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With many companies trying to transform themselves to recognize and create more types of value for a broader range of stakeholders, the way publicly traded companies are speaking about their plans and climate change publicly, has undeniably changed in recent years.

While the flurry of externally facing corporate sustainability reports and media releases seek to inform and position the organization in the best possible light, many have noted actions speak louder than words. Suggesting what executives say in private, may differ from public statements and actions.

Our Sustainable Innovation MBA (SI-MBA) program leadership and faculty, collaborated with TIME, to better understand how and why their language has changed over the past 10 years.

TIME curated a list of approximately 200 climate change-related words, phrases, and acronyms with input from our SI-MBA program. They then took the 300 companies that have consistently been part of the S&P index since 2012 and analyzed thousands of their annual 10-K filings—financial documents that public companies are required to submit annually to the Securities and Exchange Commission from the past 10 years.

As TIME notes. “While a 10-K can’t put you inside the boardroom, it amounts to one of the best public records of the obstacles a company foresees to future profitability.” They discovered that “general terms relating to climate change had already crept in by 2012, suggesting that some companies have long perceived climate change to be a threat to their operations.”

In addition, even among those companies who have consistently talked to the climate crisis in broad terms, it is only relatively recently that their vocabulary relating to climate goals and initiatives has become part of companies’ thinking about the issue.

Grossman faculty member Patrick Callery, who studies corporate climate disclosures, notes this language shift is a bit like processing a traumatic incident. “First we deny it, then we accept it, and then at some point, we actually do something about it,” he says. “I think at this point we’re kind of at the acceptance stage and companies are talking about doing things, but I don’t think to a large extent companies are actually really doing things quite yet.”