A majority of Australian organisations are willing to disclose their emissions data irrespective of local rules, but inadequate reporting technology has held back confidence, a survey has found.

Most (81 per cent of) Australian executives said they would disclose their company’s greenhouse gas emissions irrespective of local regulations, a survey by software company Workiva found.

“This is a promising finding, and while it may be due to climate disclosure requirements being more imminent than in other countries, it does show Australian organisations overall are ahead of some of the world’s largest economic powers,” Mark Mellen, industry principal of sustainability at Workiva, said.

“Some of that remaining reluctance to disclose among organisations may come down to a lack of confidence in the technology required to enable accurate reporting.”

While most executives intended to report their emissions, the survey revealed a widespread lack of confidence in existing business reporting technologies. Almost all (94 per cent) of executives believed that their current reporting setup would be inadequate to comply with incoming mandatory climate disclosure requirements.

Furthermore, a third (33 per cent) of business leaders said that they did not fully trust their financial data, compared to just a quarter in global counterparts.

Most Australian executives (97 per cent) agreed that integrating financial and climate data would help them identify performance gaps and enhance financial growth opportunities, the Workiva survey found.

“That the majority would disclose emissions irrespective of policy is a great outcome, and shows that an understanding of the benefits of emissions reporting is becoming embedded,” Narain Viswanathan, Workiva’s country leader for Australia and New Zealand, said.

“Reporting climate disclosures should be the default setting for organisations across the country, but reporting is complex: it takes numerous factors to overcome, including improved data management, collaboration, and efficiency enabled by technology.”

While the uptake of climate disclosures is a promising development for climate action, experts have warned that the climate models being produced in industry often don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Dr Tanya Fiedler, climate risk accounting expert at the University of NSW, told Accounting Times that many climate risk models emerging from industry sources were inaccurate.

“At the moment, there are lots of folks out there who are trying to build models that integrate [climate] projections into insights around individual assets, but research has shown that the outputs of those are non-comparable, which suggests that there’s a lack of accuracy,” Fiedler explained.

“They’re also black-boxed so it’s not possible for anyone to look under the hood and to verify that they are using science with veracity.”

Fiedler’s team recommended that businesses seeking to model their climate risks should adopt a qualitative reporting approach, as climate models are too imprecise to give companies asset-specific risk insights.

“You’re dealing with something very different to what we’re accustomed to in financial accounting. And so trying to solve it in the same way that we do for financial accounting isn’t necessarily appropriate.”