From False Promises to Real Solutions: A guide on how to navigate greenwashing by corporations and governments

Friends of the Earth Europe has released a new guide to help activists, policymakers and interested citizens navigate through the maze of false promises made by corporations and bought by governments. It provides a checklist to put false promises in food, farming and  biodiversity – from carbon offsetting to new GMOs, biodiversity offsetting to lab-grown meat – to the test of environmental sustainability and social justice. In this blog, we are sharing some excerpts directly from the guide, along with the guide itself. 

 

Big corporations have been mastering the art of greenwash for decades, even as their activities have seen water sources diminish and become contaminated, soils degraded, air polluted, ecosystems destroyed and communities displaced. Polluting corporations often couch their so-called ‘solutions’ in the language of sustainability, or co-opt terms from grassroots movements, twisting their use to serve their own ends. Some of the concepts they promote might sound appealing, such as “nature-based solutions”, but in reality are closely linked to the corporate capture of food policies and environmental governance.

As a result of this greenwashing, governments and other decision makers are buying into a number of corporate false promises, from genetic modification to carbon and biodiversity offsetting, which are promoted as ‘easy fixes’ to complex, systemic problems. Increasingly, policy-makers are supporting and promoting these false promises with favourable policies and public funding – demonstrating what a dangerous distraction they are, and why our campaigning efforts must call them out.

The science is clear: we have a decade to put our world on a course that avoids catastrophic climate change, and reverses the decline of biodiversity. This means we need real solutions to cut carbon emissions at source, to ensure everyone can eat healthy, nutritious food, to protect and restore ecosystems, and to bring people back to the table. We also need business and governments to change their approach to use of land, seas and resources and tighter environmental regulations so that species, habitats and ecosystems stop being eroded and pushed to the edge of extinction.

Many of the real solutions needed already exist – from agroecology and locally-adapted, GMO- and pesticide-free farming methods to community-based renewable energy and an end to fossil fuel extraction – they simply need to be implemented on a much wider scale, with proper support and public funding. The real solutions to the crises we’re facing must, moreover, be embedded within an economy that is life-sustaining and operates within Earth’s limits.

With this guide, Friends of the Earth Europe wants to ignite the conversation around corporate false promises, and provide tools to help expose and counteract the greenwashing that tries to present them as solutions. Across food, agriculture, climate and biodiversity, comparable tactics are being employed by corporations that want to maintain business as usual and keep profiting from the crises they’ve helped to create, and distract governments from adopting solutions they dislike, or do not control.

The False Promise Checklist set out in Friends of the Earth Europe’s guide can be used to examine the so-called ‘solutions’ being put forward in these different but interconnected areas. The checklist is designed to help to empower people and re-centre the debate to ensure that we put our energy into real solutions, not tools promoted by corporations to further their own interests and that ultimately perpetuate harm rather than address the root causes of the crises we’re facing.

It’s not always easy to wade through the glossy marketing, clever greenwashing and co-opted language used by big corporations and the governments that have bought into their false promises. That’s why this checklist of questions to assess the so-called ‘solutions’ being presented by corporations and governments would help expose false promises for what they are. It specifically addresses seven false promises made by big corporations and governments around food, farming, land management and biodiversity, using the five themes in its False Promise Checklist as a framework.

We hope you give this guide a read to further bolster your understanding of the greenwashing attempts promoted by agribusiness and governments, as well as start internal discussions and engage others in those.