Corporate reporting entities stress collaboration, strong documentation for sustainability reporting

The first wave of sustainability reporting for Group 1 entities was a key focus at the start of CA ANZ’s sustainability conference 2026 earlier this month, as the body’s CEO pointed to growing complexity in the organisational operating environment.

“Today comes at an important time amid geopolitical and economic uncertainty and the growing impacts of extreme weather events globally. Organisations are facing an increasingly complex operating environment,” said Ainsley Van Onselen, chief executive officer at CA ANZ.

Van Onselen said that three points are important. She noted that sustainability has moved from just a reporting exercise to a core business imperative, how CA ANZ is helping its members navigate this shift, and why collaboration is crucial for a more resilient and sustainable future.

“Sustainability is no longer a future consideration, and it's certainly no longer just a reporting exercise – across Australia and New Zealand, sustainability reporting is moving into a new phase.”

“In New Zealand, mandatory climate-related disclosures have already been established for climate reporting entities, while Australia has now begun its transition to mandatory sustainability reporting, and what's particularly interesting and hopeful is that organisations are taking action to go beyond the minimum requirements in the information that they disclose,” Van Onselen said.

According to CA ANZ’s State of the Market analysis, more than one in three of the 154 listed entities on the Australian Stock Exchange voluntarily disclose Scope 3 emissions, while more than half had already published formal transition plans.

Further, the accounting body’s 2026 member survey revealed that 62 per cent of its members saw climate-related risks as relevant to their role, but only around a quarter feel that they have all the information that they need to address climate and nature issues.

“Looking ahead, sustainability won't sit alongside accounting and finance. Environmental and social factors will be increasingly integrated with financial outcomes to shape how decisions are made, risks are managed, and value is created,” Van Onselen said.

“Our role is to ensure that our members remain at the forefront of these changes and continue to play a trusted leadership role in business and society,” Van Onselen said.

“And finance professionals like you play a critical role, more broadly, as trusted advisors; you bring the rigour, the judgment, the commercial perspective needed to help organisations navigate change with confidence and make better decisions,” Van Onselen said at the event.

In a panel at the event, QIC general manager of finance solutions Kerry Sanders said that the Group 1 reporting schedule showed the importance of bringing the same framework and governance of financial reporting to sustainability reporting.

“It was about looking at the business process around our opportunities and risks, and how we incorporate that into our day-to-day reporting cycle, and then mapping that into the disclosures, and then preparing the report as the final step,” Sanders said.

Having worked through her company’s first wave of assurance, QBE head of group statutory reporting and accounting policy Rachel Poo said that Australia’s mandatory sustainability reporting has not changed the way that businesses think about risk.

“One of the themes that have come up already in this conversation is that the reporting is just the end of a process that already exists in our business,” Poo said.

“In order to deliver the mandatory reporting, we had to make sure that we were able to articulate why we held that view, bring together all the activities that already existed across the business, and actually explicitly consider and document all of the assumptions, uncertainties, and limitations that existed around that.”

“What it brought was that it raised the level of discipline and the evidentiary standard that was expected around the conclusions that we made.”

Finance has the reporting architecture

For Poo, collaboration between the finance department and the broader organisation was a key benefit from the first wave of sustainability reporting.

“As a result, we had to set up more structured processes to bring together all the different functions, create that greater transparency around what was happening and all the work that underpinned the disclosures that we have to make, and provide that forum for collective challenge and discussion of these issues at all levels of management, not just at the highest level of management,” she said.

Adding to this, Sanders noted that it is not the finance department’s job to have all the answers.

“We don't own the risks or opportunities or the substance of many of the disclosures within the report. What we do bring to the table is the reporting architecture, the discipline around assurance and evidence requirements, and a clear framework that we've applied for many, many years across financial reporting that we could then bring into this sustainability discipline and allow that collaboration that you mentioned across the business to bring it all together to produce the report at the end,” Sanders said.

Poo noted that as this mandatory assurance was a first for the country, it provided QBE with a didactic challenge.

“Without any market reports out there, we didn't have any references. The assurance process was very helpful in terms of validating and giving that independent challenge to our approach, and we were definitely challenged very hard because they were going through it for the first time as well,” Poo said.

“I think both sides probably learnt a lot, and there was an importance of being clear about the basis for any interpretation, because this standard is not prescriptive. There's a lot of judgment involved, practice is evolving, and so we needed to be very clear about the reasons for our judgments.”

“Strong documentation is your friend. Those who have not done an assurance process before are probably not accustomed to the level of documentation that we had to do for every single judgment. It's almost like there's probably more work to try and support not disclosing something than there is to just disclose something. That was definitely a key learning for some of our stakeholders.”