KLM was fined roughly €401,000 by a Copenhagen court in July for a 2023 ad campaign claiming sustainable aviation fuel represented "a big step forward" in sustainability. This claim became a cause of controversy when it was discovered that SAF only made up about 1% of KLM's actual fuel mix. This was KLM's second loss concerning substantially. Roughly two years prior to this incident, it was caught out on he same claim; an Amsterdam court ruled against near-identical "Fly Responsibly" language, over overstated claims about SAF and reforestation programmes, using strikingly similar reasoning both times.
The specific gap matters, not just the general accusation. "A big step forward" describes a transformation. One percent of the fuel mix describes a rounding error. This scenario does not reflect regulatory objection to KLM's use of sustainable fuel, or to promoting that fact sustainability in general. Rather, regulators are objecting to misleading language implying a scale of change the underlying number doesn't support, the same discipline greenwashing enforcement has converged on across jurisdictions: not whether a claim is technically true, but whether an ordinary consumer would walk away with an accurate picture.
The repeat matters more than the fine. A single greenwashing penalty could be seen as a cost-of-doing-business story. A second one, on the same underlying claim, in a different country, means it becomes a credibility story, and credibility is the actual currency sustainability marketing set out to build.
The structural gap is directly relevant to sustainable-investing mandates.
Mandatory ESG disclosure regimes, such as the EU’s CSRD, increasingly require companies to substantiate their formal sustainability reporting through audit and assurance processes. Marketing communications, however, sit entirely outside this framework. A company may therefore withstand rigorous scrutiny of its official CSRD disclosures while simultaneously running an advertising campaign containing claims that were never subject to equivalent verification before publication, which is precisely what occurred in both cases examined here. In effect, consumer-protection litigation, pursued retrospectively by ombudsmen and courts, is performing an enforcement function that ought properly to be addressed through substantiation before such claims reach the public.
Three different readings of the same ruling. The court’s verdict was narrow and technical: a 1% change had been marketed as a meaningful shift. KLM’s response was notably restrained, expressing that the company was “disappointed” and was considering whether to appeal. The language was procedural rather than reflective of any acknowledgement of a recurring pattern. Environmental groups following greenwashing litigation, however, drew a broader conclusion from the same facts: that naming and shaming can be an effective form of accountability, particularly when courts in two separate countries have reached the same finding independently. None of the three parties is disputing the underlying facts; rather, they attach different significance to what those facts imply.
What this means in practice
- For funds and analysts assessing greenwashing litigation risk, a single ruling against a company is a data point; a second ruling on the same underlying claim is a governance-quality signal, evidence the substantiation process wasn't actually fixed the first time.
- Marketing claims should be run through the same evidentiary bar as formal ESG disclosure, not a separate, lighter one, since regulators and courts are demonstrably not treating them as separate categories of risk.
- A single global ad campaign template does not get a uniform legal read across jurisdictions; running the same claim in a second market after losing on it in a first is a repeatable, avoidable failure, and its recurrence is itself informative about internal process.
For anyone pricing reputational or litigation risk into sustainability-linked holdings, this case is a cleaner proxy for governance quality than most greenwashing headlines, precisely because it's a repeat.