Sport, AI, HPV, Greenhushing & Ponda

Giles Gibbons
Good Business - Sustainability | Strategy | Impact
July 3, 2026

1. When climate change changes the game

Sport is front of mind for many of us. With the US FIFA World Cup, Serena returning to Wimbledon, the Women’s T20 World Cup final this weekend and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow later this month, there’s something for everyone. But have you ever considered the role sport can play in accelerating climate action and public engagement?

Last week, we were at Earthfest’s The Future of Sustainable Sport event, bringing together Olympians, Paralympians and sustainability leaders from across sport and business.

One of the strongest themes was sport’s unique position in driving cultural shifts around sustainability. With a huge zone of influence and growing exposure to climate impacts, sport is becoming a canary in the coal mine for climate change.

Lord Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics, reflected on how extreme heat is already forcing changes to major events. The marathon at the Tokyo Olympics, for example, was moved to Sapporo to protect athletes from dangerous temperatures, while sporting bodies continue to explore how competition schedules may need to adapt in a warming world.

And it isn’t just elite sport feeling the impact. Recent analysis suggests flooding and drought already cost UK grassroots sport around £320 million each year through repairs, maintenance and lost revenue. From waterlogged pitches to cancelled fixtures, climate change is becoming a practical challenge for clubs and communities worldwide.

But there is also an opportunity. Sport reaches millions of people in ways sustainability communications often cannot. Athletes are trusted voices, clubs are cultural institutions rooted in communities, and fans already have an emotional connection to the issues affecting the sports they love.

Examples include Liverpool FC and AXA’s Reds for Blue campaign on ocean sustainability, Adapt2Win’s work with athletes including Keira Walsh on climate adaptation, and The Football Association and E.ON helping grassroots clubs cut costs and emissions through energy upgrades.

The biggest takeaway? Sometimes the most effective way to communicate climate change is to speak a language people already care about. Flooded pitches, cancelled games and missed PBs make climate change tangible in a way that “degrees of warming” often cannot.

2. Who owns the cost of AI?

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we work. That’s no longer a prediction; it’s already happening. But as companies race to build increasingly powerful AI systems, another question is becoming harder to ignore: who is responsible for the disruption they create?

So far, the answer has been unclear. Governments have been slow to act, and the debate over how to regulate AI is far from settled. Meanwhile, public frustration is growing, and millions of workers are left wondering what comes next.

This week, a coalition of AI companies, major corporations and foundations announced RAISE US, a new initiative funded with $500 million to help workers prepare for an AI-driven economy and backed by a list of notable industry giants: OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft. The idea is to invest in reskilling and career support now, before the disruption hits, rather than after.

This is interesting partly because of the money and the names involved. But also because of what it suggests about how responsibility is starting to shift.

Often, companies treat the social impacts of technology as someone else’s problem. Governments would regulate, schools would adapt, workers would figure it out. But AI isn’t moving slowly, and the companies building it know that better than anyone. So it’s good to see them facing into the disruption and helping to shape the response?

Whether RAISE US will deliver real results remains to be seen. But we’ll be watching with interest, both beacuse of what it might find, and what it will show about the future lines of responsiblity.

3. The trust factor

The HPV vaccine is one of public health’s biggest success stories. A major UK study recently found that women vaccinated against HPV at ages 12–13 have an almost zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before age 30. Even more strikingly, no women aged 20–24 died from cervical cancer in England between 2020 and 2024. Researchers estimate that the programme has already prevented around 200 deaths.

But these remarkable results come with an important reminder: vaccines only work when people trust them enough to take them.

The UK shows what is possible when vaccination rates remain high. Japan shows the opposite. After concerns about vaccine safety gained traction in 2013, HPV vaccine uptake collapsed despite the science remaining unchanged. Experts now warn that this loss of confidence could lead to thousands of preventable cases of cervical cancer in the years ahead.

This is why organisations such as the Vaccine Confidence Project focus on understanding and addressing public concerns, monitoring vaccine sentiment, and helping to build trust before misinformation affects uptake. Their work recognises that knowledge, emotions and social norms can be just as important as medical evidence.

Our work with SKY Girls Kenya reflects this challenge. Originally focused on tobacco prevention and later HIV, the programme now also addresses HPV vaccination. Research found that while many girls had heard of the vaccine, almost half did not know it protects against cervical cancer and some had concerns about side effects. To address this, SKY uses relatable, girl-centred content that builds knowledge, confidence and trust around health decisions. One recent example can be seen in this SKY Girls Kenya HPV video.

The science behind HPV vaccination is increasingly clear. As this success story enters its next chapter, the key question is no longer whether the vaccine works, but how we ensure every girl has the knowledge, confidence and support to benefit from it.

4. Shout, don't hush!

Greenwashing has become a term that most of us recognise today. It was first coined in the 1980s, but the real shift came in the 2000s when brands began seeing sustainability as a strong marketing lever – rightly in our eyes. The problem was that some companies began misusing this lever and making bold environmental claims, often without clear evidence to support them. That pattern still shows today as more than half of green claims in the EU are found to be vague, misleading or unfounded.

Things have changed in recent years – regulation has tightened and consumer scrutiny has grown, but the problem is far from solved. Just last month, ads from Adidas, Uniqlo and Calvin Klein were banned in the UK for misleading recycling claims. Regulators found that the language used could give people the impression that products were fully recycled, even when that was not the case.

Another upshot of this is as that as consumer mistrust and expectations have risen, and regulation has become tighter, some brands have been stepping away from communicating about sustainability. This is termed greenhushing. Businesses may still be making progress, but they avoid talking about it because it feels safer. Our view is that this isn’t the answer either, as when progress is not visible, it can start to look like there is no progress at all. And using consumer communications to build desirability through sustainability impact is an important part of creating momentum for change.

The GreenShouting Guide, launched this year may be part of the answer. Created by B Lab and Creatives for Climate, it is designed to help close this gap by giving communication leaders a practical framework to talk about sustainability with more clarity and confidence. It prompts users to think more carefully about the different aspects of their messaging with an easy-to-use step-by-step process and a set of ‘seven dials’ to fine-tune it to share their sustainability story loudly and clearly.

The message is not to stop talking about sustainability but to do it better.

5. Ponda warmth

Fashion has long had a padding problem, with the warmth in most jackets coming from goose down or petroleum-based synthetics, neither of which is doing the planet any favours. Ponda, a Bristol biomaterials company, has found a neat solution in the form of the humble wetland plant: Typha.

Better known as bulrush or cattail, it’s a plant with a sausage-shaped seed head, whose fluffy seed fibres are used to make Ponda’s BioPuff® insulation. Ponda says the material outperforms premium synthetics on warmth, and that each BioPuff-insulated jacket supports four square metres of healthy wetland, stores 800 litres of water, and avoids around 9kg of carbon emissions a year.

The real innovation, though, is the supply chain. Typha is grown through paludiculture: farming on rewetted peatlands. Drained peatlands release around 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, comparable to the fashion industry’s entire annual footprint, so every hectare brought back into wet production turns an emissions source into a carbon sink.

Big names are taking note, with Stella McCartney, Berghaus and Ahluwalia all featuring BioPuff in their products. Now Ponda is crowdfunding to scale manufacturing and broaden the ownership of regenerative fashion innovation, letting anyone invest in the wetlands keeping them warm.