In November 2025, Patagonia—a brand best known for its sustainability efforts—published its first impact report in its 52-year history. The main takeaway? “Nothing we do is sustainable.”
The report was 154 pages long and gave a thorough breakdown of Patagonia’s impact, covering everything from its governance model and charitable donations to revenue and supply chain activism. Still, customers loved it: the report has been downloaded more than 30,000 times, and Patagonia says its social media posts about the report got 148,000 interactions. “154-page PDFs have never been more popular,” jokes Corley Kenna, Patagonia’s chief communications and impact officer.
The online response showed just how powerful good impact reporting can be. But it’s not easy to get right. Until now, impact reporting has been a bit of a free-for-all, full of vague stories and inconsistent methods. This shows just how far the industry still has to go—not only to meet its sustainability goals, but also to communicate and explain its progress.
“There was an enthusiastic phase at the start, when companies wanted to do and talk about as much as possible,” says Catharina Martinez Pardo, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “Over time, it became clear that it’s not always great to announce what you’re trying to do by 2040 or 2050. It’s better to talk about what’s happening now, or what has already happened and can be proven. If you compare year to year, it might look like companies are doing less or talking less about impact, but really, the way companies communicate impact has changed.”
In November 2025, Patagonia—a brand best known for its sustainability efforts—published its first impact report in its 52-year history. Photo: Patagonia
Today, companies say communicating about sustainability has never been more confusing. “You want to share your progress and inspire others, but at the same time, you don’t want to be seen as a greenwasher,” says Morten Isachsen, CEO of Norwegian jewelry brand Tom Wood, which released its fifth annual impact report in April. European regulators going back and forth on whether to push ahead with greenwashing restrictions hasn’t helped, especially since several EU countries—including Norway—have their own anti-greenwashing rules, and watchdogs are already handing out fines regardless. Combined with the political backlash against sustainability, this has led to a growing trend of “greenhushing,” where some brands scale back or stop impact reporting altogether.
The confusion shows in the reports themselves, which vary wildly between dense scientific documents and heavy-handed marketing. Then there’s the timing. Unlike financial reports, which follow a strict schedule, impact reports are published whenever brands decide. Some are annual, but brands often skip a year or prefer to publish one-off reports on a whim. There has been a lot of activity in recent months. H&M published its annual impact report in March, showing a 34.6% reduction in Scope 3 emissions. Then Kering shared a 10-year retrospective impact report, wrapping up the luxury group’s previous sustainability strategy just in time for new CEO Luca de Meo to introduce his own. And Reformation gave an update on whether it had reached its “climate positive” target, before filing for an IPO.
Regulation is offering some guidance, but less than expected. Just this week, the EU revised its reporting standards to reduce the administrative burden on brands and suppliers, cutting about 60% of the mandatory data points and 70% of the total. It says these changes will save businesses 30% in reporting costs. But for the companies still required to report, there’s a long road ahead. Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), companies with more than a thousand employees and over €450 million in annual net turnover will need to follow the European Sustainability Reporting Standards.The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) cover 10 topics that companies must report on: climate change, pollution, water and marine resources, biodiversity and ecosystems, resource use and the circular economy, their own workforce, workers in the value chain, affected communities, consumers and end-users, and business conduct. This will apply from the 2027 financial year, so the first reports are expected in early 2028.
With so much focus on impact reporting, it’s a good time to look at emerging best practices: what information to include, how to present it, and what forces will shape impact reporting in the future.
Patagonia’s impact report covers everything from its governance model to material innovation, waste, and social impact.
What to include
In 2022, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard handed control of his $3 billion company to a specially created charity called the Holdfast Collective, declaring the earth its “only shareholder.” “Four years on, we still get questions from our colleagues and customers about what it really means to be owned by a purpose trust and a non-profit,” explains Kenna. “So we thought it would be nice to give an update on that, and what the Holdfast Collective has achieved since it was established. That starts with our governance model, but it goes all the way through to how we make our products, how we treat our employees, and what happens when a customer purchases from us.”
Deciding what to include was no small task. Patagonia started with things it was already reporting elsewhere, including B Corp and the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi). While the communications and impact team managed the year-long process, the whole business contributed, says Kenna. This allowed subject matter experts in areas like living wages or material innovation to guide the relevant sections instead of marketers, working with the editing and image teams to bring the impact report to life in a way that different audiences could understand.
It’s common for impact reports to present a false image, whether intentionally or not. Most often, this is dishonesty by omission — sustainability is a complex field, and capturing the full scale of both successes and areas for improvement would require a book, not just an impact report. But honesty is the best policy, Kenna says. “I don’t know when honesty became something notable, but that is the main piece of feedback we have received — people saying, ‘I can’t believe how honest you were.’ Often, the work we do to solve one problem just creates another problem. That’s what makes this work so tiring, but we’re not going to make progress if corporate reporting isn’t honest.”
While Patagonia decided to put everything in one report, Everlane took a different approach. Some of its previous reports were as long as 100 pages, but CEO Alfred Chang says trying to fit everything into one report “flattened the nuance” of individual points, while still being too “long and cumbersome” for readers.
This year, Everlane split its impact report into three sections, which the brand says it still plans to release throughout the year, despite being acquired by ultra-fast fashion giant Shein. “Keep Earth Cool,” published in May, deals with carbon emissions. It will be followed by “Keep Earth Clean,” focusing on materials, chemistry, waste, and circularity, as well as “Do Right By People,” which will tackle social impact across Everlane’s supply chain. “More information does not always create more clarity,” explains Chang. “The goal now is to give each area of our progress the space it deserves and make reporting feel more like an ongoing dialogue with our customers and stakeholders.”
Tom Wood focuses its impact report around people, the planet, and product. CEO Morten Isachsen says it’s important to distinguish between “story-telling” and “fact-telling,” so impact reports are honest about the challenges as well as successes.
For Tom Wood, the annual impact report is not just aSharing new statistics is also a chance to make forward-looking statements about where the industry is headed and what needs to change for brands to reach their sustainability goals. “If you look back, you’ll see our reports have evolved a lot,” says Isachsen. “Each year, we try to go wider and deeper, include as much as we can, be as transparent as possible, and ultimately lead with radical honesty about our flaws and where we’re not progressing as we’d like.” This year’s report explored decoupling, explaining the brand’s decision to track emissions both in absolute terms and relative to revenue, and showing the link between financial growth and emissions. Since 2022, Tom Wood says it has cut absolute emissions from 456 to 297 tons of CO2e, and its emissions intensity (per million Norwegian Krone in revenue) from 3.46 to 1.52 tons.
What a brand chooses to focus on in its impact report says a lot about what it values, according to Martinez Pardo. “It’s all about prioritization. A few years ago, we saw a lot of impact reports trying to cover everything,” she says. “But sustainability is such a broad field. It’s better to show what your company really stands for and what your supply chain is truly focused on.”
Framing the methodology
A good impact report starts with a clear understanding of its audience. For Tom Wood and Patagonia, impact reports are an important tool for employee satisfaction and retention, boosting team pride by giving employees a look into their colleagues’ impact areas. But not all readers have the same level of sustainability knowledge, and what consumers want to read is likely different from what investors, analysts, and consultants want. “It has to be understandable and readable,” says Kenna. “A saying we live by is to always communicate as if we’re talking to our friends and equals.”
Since impact reporting is still relatively new, and audiences are still learning what different metrics mean and how to interpret them, context is key, says Everlane’s senior sustainability manager Michi Fried. “We try to explain why numbers change from year to year, whether it’s due to product mix, a logistics decision, a methodology improvement, or some combination,” she explains. Fried points to Everlane’s 2025 per-product emissions figure as a good example. “A few things came together: product mix shifted toward higher-footprint natural fibers like cashmere, wool, alpaca, and silk; we temporarily relied more on air freight because of tariff-related constraints; and our measurement methodology improved. Each of those is a legitimate reason for emissions to fluctuate, but together they need careful framing. The responsibility is to be honest about all of it while keeping focus on the long-term trend of reduction, which for us is a 60% drop in absolute emissions since 2019.”
This year, Everlane is releasing its impact report in three chapters, hoping to give more space and detail to each topic.
Photos: Everlane
Many fashion brands structure their impact reports to match their sustainability strategy. Tom Wood, for example, follows the people, planet, and product pillars. But circular fashion services take a different approach. “We don’t have a value chain. We don’t own a production line. We don’t use natural resources. We are a facilitator between two consumers who have already bought something and want to exchange it online. It’s a completely different type of business,” says Vinted sustainability and strategy lead Marianne Gybels. “Of course, Vinted also creates emissions. We have an office, warehouses, shipping, and data centers, all of which add up. But overall, we use the impact report to dig into the assumptions people have about our business, and back them up with solid insights we can use to guide the business forward.”
Impact reporting can also help keep the sector in check as it grows, documenting changes that might undermine its core mission, such as the trend toward drop-shipping fast fashion.Selling counterfeit products on secondhand platforms, or using the availability of resale as an excuse to shop more, are real concerns. For credibility, it’s important that these claims and methods are verified by an independent third party, Gybels continues. “We never want it to look like Vinted is saying Vinted is sustainable.”
Today, the main challenge for impact reports is balancing accuracy, comparability, and clarity, says Fried. “These three things are constantly pulling in different directions,” she explains. “As science improves, supplier data gets better, and emissions factors are updated, the work gets stronger. But it also means that what looks like a drop in year-on-year progress might actually be a measurement improvement, not a real increase in emissions. Communicating that clearly, without losing the reader, is one of the hardest parts of this work.”
Bigger changes ahead
Until now, impact reports have been completely voluntary for both public and private companies. But new regulations will soon force a change. Going forward, companies will be required to report on certain data points every year, creating a new framework for impact reporting with less room for brands to pick only the most favorable insights. “We really lack standards in impact reporting,” says Luca Solca, a luxury goods analyst at Bernstein. “The risk is that impact reports become a PR exercise, showing only your best side.”
Under the updated ESRS rules that the EU just adopted, larger businesses will have to report on specific data points each year, in line with their financial reports. But this is mainly aimed at investors and doesn’t apply to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which make up about 90% of the European market, says Andreas Rasche, a professor of business in society at the Copenhagen Business School Center for Sustainability.
Still, there are best practices that all businesses can learn from. One hotly debated element was double materiality. Despite pressure from lobbyists to remove this clause, the EU voted to keep it. This means businesses need to report on both their impact and the financial risks it creates. The CSRD also requires limited assurance, meaning an independent third party must verify at least some of the methods and claims. This is an attempt to boost investor trust in sustainability reporting, which has historically been quite low.
“The standards are out now, and they won’t change anymore,” says Rasche. “My advice is for businesses to start using them as soon as possible.”
Since 2022, Tom Wood says it has reduced its absolute emissions from 456 tonnes of CO2e to 297 tonnes per year.
But regulation comes with its own risks. Brands shouldn’t be able to choose what they want to be transparent about, says Gybels. “But when you’re hit with so many data points, the question becomes: what does it all add up to? And what story does that data tell? Eventually, we might be able to compare results and tell a story about the industry as a whole. But for now, I just see more pressure on sustainability teams to report a longer list of requirements, leading to thicker reports that not many people will read.”
Aside from regulation, it’s time for fashion businesses to improve their methods, says Everlane’s Fried. “Fashion still relies too much on modeled data, and that creates a natural limit on accuracy,” she explains, noting that many brands still use generic lifecycle assessments and industry averages to calculate their impact. “You can have a rigorous method applied to imprecise inputs and still end up with an imprecise output. In other words: bad data in, bad data out.” This year, Everlane teamed up with Eileen Fisher, Dôen, Reformation, and Zimmermann on a silk lifecycle assessment, using supplier-specific data. This led Everlane to revise its earlier estimate of silk’s carbon impact—the new estimate is 47% lower. “That kind of recalibration only happens when the industry is willing to share data and resources openly,” she says.When brands update their methods, it’s important to also revise past figures so that impact reports stay comparable. “When we improve our methodology, we go back and recalculate earlier years instead of just using new numbers going forward,” says Fried, pointing to Everlane’s 2025 carbon baseline, which she says changed as science and methods improved. “That can make the story less straightforward, but we’d rather have a more accurate picture than a comfortable one. The data needs to be useful for making decisions, and that means being honest about when and why the numbers change.”
To move forward, the industry needs a version of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) tailored to sustainability, says Solca. “We need a set of audited, standard measures to assess how brands are doing on key metrics. This is still a work in progress and is heavily influenced by political interpretation.”
“We need harmonization,” agrees Martinez Pardo. In May, BCG and the Copenhagen-based nonprofit Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) released the CFO Agenda, an update on the annual CEO Agenda report, this time focusing on the people who control the finances in fashion companies. The goal was to create a plan for integrating sustainability and finance, with reporting as a key concern. “Now that we have more unified data sources and have made so much progress on transparency and traceability, this is definitely where we should be heading.”
Most brands agree that financial reporting and impact reporting need to be better aligned, but they shouldn’t necessarily be combined into one. “Treating sustainability as separate from the business can make it harder to see the full picture. Product decisions, supplier choices, logistics, materials, and growth strategy all affect impact,” says Chang. “That said, dedicated impact reporting still plays an important role. It allows companies to provide technical details, methodology, and context that might not fit naturally into a financial report.”
It all comes back to using impact reports as a tool for internal advocacy, says Martinez Pardo. This is especially important now, when many sustainability teams are facing layoffs, restructuring, and external political pushback. “Time for sustainability in executive discussions is shrinking,” she explains. “There are so many other priorities, like geopolitics and AI. That’s why we need to bring sustainability and financial language together: so it’s easier to talk about impact initiatives in a way that external readers can understand and internal colleagues can support.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about how to write a sustainability report covering beginner to advanced topics
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What exactly is a sustainability report
Its a document where a company publicly shares its environmental social and governance impacts Think of it like a financial report but instead of money it tracks things like carbon emissions employee diversity and ethical sourcing
2 Why should my small business bother writing one
It builds trust Customers and investors increasingly want to know if youre responsible It also helps you spot inefficiencies and can save you money in the long run
3 What is the triple bottom line
Its the core idea behind most sustainability reports It means measuring success by three Ps People Planet and Profit
4 Do we have to report on everything
No Most frameworks encourage materialityyou only report on the issues that are most important to your business and your stakeholders A tech company focuses on ewaste and data privacy a clothing brand focuses on water use and labor rights
5 What is a materiality assessment
A process where you survey employees investors and customers to figure out which sustainability topics matter most to them and your business This list becomes the table of contents for your report
Intermediate Advanced Questions
6 Which reporting framework should I use
It depends on your audience GRI is the most common and detailed for broad public use SASB is better for investors TCFD is best if climate risk is your main concern Many companies now use a mix
7 How do I set meaningful targets
Dont just say we want to be greener Use the SMART framework Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Timebound For example Reduce Scope 1 2 emissions by 30 by 2030 using 2025 as the baseline year