Sam Riley, Co-Founder and CEO at Drova

It also means more attention from the top, more urgency, and for the sustainability teams leading this work well, a growing list of efficiency wins the whole business can see.

By Sam Riley, Co-Founder and CEO at Drova

The first time you reconcile a company’s energy, water and waste data properly, you tend to find money. Not sustainability money. Real money. A tariff nobody had renegotiated. A meter still billing for a building that closed. A chiller running full tilt through a wing that’s empty by six. No organisation gets through this work without walking away holding savings it didn’t know it had.

However, that’s not the reputation sustainability reporting carries. It has historically been treated as a cost, a compliance chore, a spreadsheet that grows a column every year – and it generally belongs to one increasingly tired person. AASB S2 is quietly changing that, and not in the way most people expected.

Look closely at what the standard actually asks for. Four things: governance, strategy, risk management, and hard metrics including Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Only that last piece has ever really belonged to sustainability. Governance sits with the Board. Strategy sits with leadership. Risk sits with the risk team. And yet, long before AASB S2 required any of it, pulling that picture together into one report, and chasing every function for the inputs to make it hold up, landed on whoever held the sustainability title. They owned the reporting without any authority over three of the four things feeding it.

And the underlying data rarely cooperates. Fewer than 30% of organisations are confident in the accuracy of their own ESG data (KeyESG, 2026). Sixty percent of finance leaders admit that data is scattered across systems that were never built to talk to each other (ESG Today, 2026). None of that was ever really a sustainability problem. It only looked like one, because sustainability was the only function that showed up to solve it.

Then AASB S2 did something no internal pep talk ever managed. It made the disclosure audited and board-signed, exactly like the financial statements. Suddenly a CFO’s name carries the same exposure on this number that it has always carried on every other one. Nobody had to be persuaded to care. The regulation simply made caring part of the job. And for Group 2 entities, reporting on financial years starting from 1 July 2026, that shift is happening now.

The pressure does not stop at the audit. Investors are asking the same questions auditors are. Fifty-eight percent now say ESG data gaps or quality issues are the single biggest barrier to their sustainable investment decisions (KeyESG, 2026). A number that used to live inside a sustainability committee now helps decide whether the business can raise capital at all. That conversation has left the committee. It sits wherever the CFO sits.

Which brings us back to the money. Melbourne Business School and Kearney found that companies using analytics to optimise their processes cut waste and emissions by 39%. Done properly, this work is not a cost centre defending its existence. It is the function that walks in with a compliant disclosure in one hand and a list of savings in the other. Both, for once, are things a Board genuinely wants to hear.

That is the good news for anyone who has been holding this alone. The savings only surface when the numbers are clean, and the numbers only get clean when the work stops being rebuilt by hand, once a year, under deadline, by one person. You will never catch the meter nobody is watching if you only look in the week the report is due. That used to be a fix only the sustainability budget would pay for. Now finance needs the same clean data you do, so the case for resourcing it properly is no longer yours to make alone.

AASB S2 did not make the job heavier. It made it visible: to a Board that finally has to look, and to a CFO who now has to own it. So the next time a forgotten meter turns up, the win is still yours. The number underneath it just is not yours to answer for alone anymore.

About Sam Riley 

Sam Riley is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with more than two decades of leadership experience in enterprise software and business strategy. Sam is Co-Founder and CEO of Drova, a platform that helps businesses run good – bringing risk, compliance, resilience and sustainability together into a simple, unified and AI-led platform. Prior to founding Drova, Sam was CEO and co-founder of Ansarada, a global SaaS platform that pioneered virtual data rooms and information governance solutions for major financial transactions including mergers and acquisitions, capital raisings and audits. Under his leadership, Ansarada grew from a startup to a market-leading global technology company. With deep expertise in product innovation, Sam has a strong track record building solutions that are simple, scalable and deliver long-term impact and outcomes for businesses on a national and global scale. Visit www.drova.com for more information.

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