The Anti-Greenwash Charter, an international organisation targeting transparent and credible communication, has published a recent report exploring how sustainability communication is evolving across the Australian built environment.
The report, authored by sustainability consultant, author and advisor to the Anti-Greenwash Charter in Australia John Pabon, drew on insights from representatives of local architecture practices and government organisations, including Alec Tzannes of Tzannes Associates and Nigel Justins of Architectus, along with Stefan Preuss from the Office of the Victorian Government Architect and Abbie Galvin of the Government Architect New South Wales, who participated alongside other industry representatives in a roundtable held in December 2025.
With organisations facing mounting pressure to demonstrate leadership in sustainability, the report found they either over-promise or under-deliver on sustainability outcomes, resulting in a growing tension between “greenwashing” and “greenhushing.”
“For architects, this is becoming a real practice challenge,” said Anti-Greenwash Charter CEO Charlie Martin.
“Communicating design intent, embodied carbon and long-term performance in a way that is both accurate and meaningful is increasingly difficult under rising scrutiny,” he said.
According to the report, a gap between designers’ intent and a building’s performance was reflected in architects’ bids for projects, whose “stories often detach from deliverable reality,” and exacerbated by architects’ limited involvement in post-occupancy assessments.
A lack of trusted third-party certification tools for specifiers to distinguish genuine credentials from greenwashing, with no consistent consequences for false claims, was also identified in the report as a contributor to the problem.
One of the participating government architects who contributed to the report’s roundtable estimated that, beyond those from “top-tier developers,” 90 percent of development applications involved some form of greenwashing. However, the report observed that a “fear of regulatory action is driving organisations toward silence rather than improved communication … depriving the market of the information needed to drive genuine progress.”
According to Martin, the findings point “to a broader shift where communicating sustainability with clarity and evidence is becoming as important as the design itself.”
The report’s call to action advises organisations to audit claims and strengthen internal processes, while asking the industry to collectively identify common standards and reliable certification tools that reduce the burden on individual specifiers. For government and regulators, the report’s advice is to “provide sector-specific guidance, lead by example in procurement and policy, and ensure enforcement is proportionate and educational, rather than purely punitive.”
The full report can be accessed online.