ASRS is more than emissions: How finance teams can lead the climate conversation

For years, the climate conversation inside business has been framed as a measurement problem. Get the emissions number. Publish the chart. Tick the box.

Well, not anymore.

Australia’s sustainability reporting regime is pulling climate out of the side project lane and into the general purpose financial report. Under ASRS, and specifically AASB S2, climate disclosure is no longer a story told by sustainability teams alone. It is a governance, risk, controls and finance story. It’s a CFO story.

And that changes the real metric that matters.

Emissions are still the measure. But confidence is the outcome.

The new job for finance teams: Make climate decision-useful

If you sit in finance, you already know the pattern. Metrics are a manageable challenge. What breaks teams is everything around the number: boundaries, assumptions, ownership, controls, evidence, and the questions that follow.

In plain terms, AASB S2 asks for far more than a greenhouse gas inventory. It cuts across governance oversight, management responsibilities, financially material climate risks and opportunities, scenario analysis, metrics and targets, and how all of that connects back to the financial statements.

That is why the most useful way to think about ASRS is not simply ‘sustainability reporting’. It is risk and performance reporting, with climate as the lens.

This also explains a quiet reality: CFOs are being pushed into the centre of the climate conversation, whether they asked for it or not.

Not because finance is suddenly expected to be climate science fluent, but because finance is the function that knows how to make information defensible.

Why CFO ownership is becoming non-negotiable

In the recent Drova and Avarni webinar, ‘AASB S2 in Plain Finance’, the message was clear: this is not a one-person job, but ownership must sit with the CFO.

AASB S2 is fundamentally financial. It is about climate-related risks and opportunities that could reasonably be expected to affect financial performance, financial position or cash flows.

That means the CFO becomes the integrator across four lanes:

1. Finance for metrics, financial effects, disclosure drafting and sign-off
2. Risk for identification, assessment, prioritisation and integration into ERM
3. Sustainability and compliance for translating requirements into workable inputs
4. Board for oversight, challenge and accountability

When roles are unclear, the failure mode is predictable. Duplicated work. Inconsistent numbers. Climate risks sitting outside the risk register. Evidence scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets. Assurance pain at the finish line.

The irony is that many organisations will do a lot of work, yet still feel unprepared. Not because they did not try, but because they did not build a controlled process.

The real challenge is not Scope 3 - it’s completeness

Scope 3 will get the headlines because it is messy. But auditors rarely start by arguing about a decimal place. They start with a simpler question: how do you know you captured everything?

Completeness is the first audit principle that bites sustainability teams, and it is where finance discipline matters most.

The practical insight shared at the webinar is unglamorous but very useful: most organisations can start with data finance already owns, including spend-based data from the general ledger. It will not be perfect. It does not have to be. But it must be defensible, documented, and improved over time.

In other words, the first-year win is not a pristine net zero story. It is a baseline you can stand behind.

Disclosure is direction, if you treat it like a management system

The most interesting shift in climate reporting is what happens after the disclosure.

Once you identify financially material climate risks, define time horizons, map where those risks concentrate across the value chain, and link them to strategy, capital deployment, and controls, you have built something more valuable than a report.

You have built a decision framework.

This is the moment CFOs can redefine their role in sustainability. Not as the team that signs off the narrative, but as strategic advisors who make climate trade-offs visible.

What does that look like in practice?

• Climate risks are assessed using the same rigour as other enterprise risks, not parked in a separate register.
• The board sees climate as a standing agenda item, with clear governance and management escalation paths.
• Metrics are not collected for reporting alone. They are tied to the risks that matter, monitored through management reporting, and used in decisions.
• Evidence is gathered as the work happens, not hunted down at year end.

This is where the conversation moves beyond emissions. Emissions tell you the size of the footprint. Confidence tells you whether the organisation is steering.

Why most teams will struggle without workflow

AASB S2 is written like a disclosure standard, but lived like an operating model.

It does not just list what to disclose. It forces the disciplines that make disclosure possible: assign ownership, document judgements, link every statement to supporting evidence, and keep the trail intact so requirements are met “without last-minute reconstruction.”

That is also the point where manual approaches start to fail.

Spreadsheets are fine for a list. They are fragile for a governance workflow. A spreadsheet cannot reliably tell you who owns a clause, what evidence supports it, what changed, what was approved, and what is still missing, across finance, risk, sustainability and the board.

Finance teams do not need more frameworks. They need one practical way to get this done.

How Drova turns ASRS into a controlled, assurance-ready workflow

For ASRS and AASB S2, Drova’s approach is simple: take what the standard asks for and run it as a live workflow.

Drova gives finance teams one place to scope, assign, track, evidence, and sign off ASRS requirements, so disclosure stops being a frantic year-end project and becomes a controlled, repeatable process. You can see what’s on track, what’s at risk, and what still needs proof, before it becomes a problem.

Together with our carbon accounting partner Avarni, you also get the emissions inputs that underpin ASRS reporting, with data you can trust and an audit trail you can defend - all in one platform. The result is ASRS compliance that feels less like box-ticking and more like leadership: clear, assured, and board-ready.

The outcome: Financial clarity into climate credibility

There is a reason CFOs are leaning in.

In a market where trust is fragile, the winners will be the organisations that can show their working. Not just what they emitted, but what they assessed, what they prioritised, what they are doing about it, and how they know it is true.

That is what finance teams do best.