Most sustainability reports are written in English, rendering them inaccessible to those who need the information the most. In this blog, we explore the language gap at the heart of global ESG reporting.

There isn’t a corner of the world that isn’t feeling the impact of climate change. Here in Oxfordshire, we started the year with extreme flooding. And while the change is felt, we’re acutely aware of the fact that other parts of the world experience it to a greater extent than we do.

Climate change is often viewed as a scientific or political issue, but it is also a linguistic one. Sustainability and ESG reports are overwhelmingly produced in English, yet the communities most affected by climate change – and most in need of this information to advocate for themselves and shape policy – are exactly those who don’t have a sufficient level of English to access it. This is a systemic injustice that translation can help put right.

What are sustainability and ESG reports – and who are they for?

Sustainability reports and ESG reports are documents that companies publish to show how they’re performing on non-financial issues. Sustainability reports often take a broader view, covering a company’s environmental impact, social contributions and how it’s governed. ESG reports use the same three pillars (Environment, Social, Governance) but it’s more commonly used in an investment context.
They serve several audiences at once: investors, regulators, customers, employees and local communities and NGOs. That last group – the people living closest to the environmental and social impacts these reports describe – are those most likely to be excluded by language.

The reporting boom

As seen with the rollout of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, sustainability reporting is growing fast, driven by frameworks that are largely developed and published in English by institutions in Europe and North America.
According to research from Harvard, more than 30 jurisdictions are moving towards mandatory reporting under IFRS standards, with accelerated adoption expected in 2026–2027. Sustainability reporting reached a pivotal moment in 2025, with companies across regions navigating evolving standards, regulations and investor expectations.
But with one common climate language, the assumption across the system is that global means English-readable.

Who bears the burden?

Oxfam research shows that the countries most affected by climate change are low-income, rely heavily on agriculture and are vulnerable to extreme weather. They’re usually based in warmer parts of the world, so as the planet heats up and weather patterns change, there’s a rise in crop failures – making food more expensive for already-poor communities. Developing countries suffer the most from the consequences of climate change, despite contributing the least to global greenhouse gas emissions.
The cruel irony is that the communities most harmed by the practices that sustainability reports are meant to address are largely unable to read them. According to CLEAR Global, four billion people worldwide cannot get information they understand.

The climate language is English

Nearly 90% of globally published scientific publications are in English – a staggering dominance of a single language, given that English is the primary language in only a handful of countries.
A Climate Cardinals whitepaper argues that most of the world is excluded from the information needed to understand how climate change is reshaping the planet, including people in positions of power. Core climate reports are typically available in just six UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish), leaving billions of people without critical information on the most urgent threat to their lives and livelihoods.

The consequences are not abstract. Here are a few recorded examples:

• Over 130 languages are spoken in the Horn of Africa, a region of eastern Africa. Yet critical drought alerts and food security guidance are often issued only in English, or one national language. During a drought affecting around 36 million people, many communities did not receive life-saving information in a language they understood.
• A plethora of indigenous languages are spoken in Latin America. In the indigenous amazonian communities, Quechua, Asháninka or Aymara are often spoken instead of Spanish or Portuguese. This meant that Peru’s Indigenous People’s Climate Platform faced significant early barriers due to a lack of interpreters across its five different Indigenous languages.
• During Cyclone Amphan, which caused widespread destruction in India and Bangladesh in 2020, warnings were broadcast in Bengali and English. This left minority communities who speak Chakma or Santali relying on their neighbours to interpret life-critical messages.

What’s lost when the language is wrong?

The climate language barrier is about more than the dominance of English over other major world languages. It also encompasses the total exclusion of minority languages and the knowledge they carry.
In West Papua, Indonesia, local communities speak a range of languages like Dani, Yali and Asmat. According to CLEAR Global, these languages evolved alongside the forests and coastlines that these communities themselves have managed for millennia. But when these communities try to participate in regional climate planning meetings, they’re unable to do so – their ecological knowledge made inaccessible by a system that was never designed with them in mind. The communities lose access, and the systems lose insights.
A Cambridge University journal argues that the Global South should be involved in the co-design of sustainability frameworks – and the evidence bears that out.

Translation and the digital divide

The linguistic gap is exacerbated by the digital divide. More than half the world’s population cannot access digital information in their native language due to a lack of translation, digitisation and connectivity. While voice technologies like text-to-speech or AI assistants can help, most are only built for dominant languages. Without sufficient data or funding, minority languages are under-resourced, leaving millions of people without basic digital information.
The inclusion of translation and localisation in sustainability reporting is crucial to global adoption. Currently, report translations are often delayed and fragmented, with a dependence on the goodwill of small NGOs and volunteers.
The scale of the gap is illustrated by cases like that of researcher Sabir Ahamed in West Bengal, who found there was no existing Bengali phrase for “just transition”. He co-created a new one – ‘kalo theke aalo’, meaning ‘from darkness to hope’, immediately translating the idea into something more relatable to local communities.
Sustainability and ESG reports contain environmental, legal and financial terminology that requires expert handling and cultural interpretation. Sustainability jargon may hold weight in one context and be rendered meaningless in another. Reaching the communities that matter most means going beyond translation and into localisation, adapting not just the language, but the framing.

Work with us

At Aktuel Translations, we believe that reporting which can only be read in one language can only do so much good. If you’re looking for a translation partner who understands the nuance of sustainability and ESG content, talk to our team.