Green Claims Under the Microscope

“CO2-neutral” describes a current state, typically achieved mainly through offsetting residual emissions elsewhere. “Net Zero” describes a long-term reduction target, in which offsetting plays only a minor, residual role once deep emission cuts have been made. Regulators on both sides of the border increasingly treat these as materially different claims, not interchangeable marketing language. Under the new Swiss guidance, even the broad term “climate neutral” is now considered too vague to defend without further qualification, a useful signal for how strictly all climate-related wording will be read going forward. Courts are already moving in the same direction: in June 2024, Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruled that a confectionery manufacturer's blanket claim of being “climate neutral since 2021” was misleading, because the advertising itself did not disclose that this rested on offsetting rather than actual emission reductions, and referred customers to further detail only via an external QR code rather than in the claim itself.

Marketing and communications teams often make claims whose underlying data they cannot fully trace back to source, figures move through manual spreadsheet processes with no clear ownership or audit trail. As long as that gap exists, every environmental claim carries latent liability risk, regardless of how carefully it is worded. The more durable fix is the same discipline companies already apply to financial figures: clear ownership for data collection, documented calculation methods, a maker-checker principle, and a reconciliation of every published claim against its underlying evidence before release. It also pays off twice over, since the KPIs disclosed in your CSRD sustainability report under the revised ESRS increasingly double as the evidence base for your marketing claims: a robust, auditable data foundation serves both purposes at once, while weak data undermines both simultaneously.