For years, sustainability lived somewhere near the marketing department. It produced a glossy annual report, a set of ambitious pledges and very little that anyone could audit. That era is closing. Regulators, investors and customers increasingly want sustainability claims backed by numbers they can actually trust - and that changes who should own the work.
The honest answer is the finance function.
It is an unfashionable conclusion, but a sound one. The discipline sustainability data now demands - defined methodologies, internal controls, audit trails, consistency from one period to the next - is precisely the discipline accountants have applied to financial data for a century. As a PwC sustainability leader put it in a recent IMA article, accountants are uniquely qualified to help with sustainability. The skills are not new. The subject matter is.
Most organisations struggle with sustainability reporting for one plain reason: they have never captured non-financial information with the rigour they apply to their financials. Emissions, energy and waste data sit in spreadsheets, supplier emails and rough estimates - where they are tracked at all.
Closing that gap means building the same ecosystem around sustainability data that already exists around the ledger. Decide what needs measuring. Collect it consistently. Put controls around it. Report it in a form an investor, or an auditor, would accept. A sensible place to start is to move from spend data to usage data: knowing how much you spent on energy or travel is the easy part; understanding how much was actually consumed, and where the emissions concentrate, is what informs a decision.
Finance professionals moving into this work do have to learn the standards. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the most widely used, sorts emissions into three scopes: Scope 1 covers direct emissions from what a company owns or controls, Scope 2 the energy it buys, and Scope 3 everything across its value chain. Scopes 1 and 2 are largely a matter of pulling internal data together and controlling it. Scope 3 is the hard one - attributing emissions across suppliers and customers, which is near-impossible without sound accounting systems underneath.
There is a cultural shift too. This cannot be done from inside a finance silo. Emissions data that is accurate and consistent - across locations and across the year - means reaching into operations, procurement and facilities. The interpersonal work is part of the job, not a distraction from it.
The real trap is treating all of this as box-ticking. The data assembled to satisfy a regulator is the same data that can show where to spend, where to save, and where a supplier relationship is quietly carrying risk.
The market has noticed. In a 2025 global Morgan Stanley survey, 88% of companies said they viewed sustainability as a long-term value-creation opportunity, and 80% said they could measure the return on their sustainability-related spending. That second number is the telling one: measuring return on investment is ordinary finance work, simply pointed at a new set of figures. Technology helps, but it will not do the thinking - a 2024 PwC survey found more than 90% of business leaders still used, or planned to use, spreadsheets for sustainability reporting. The tools will improve; the need for someone who owns the definitions, the controls and the reconciliation will not.
For founders and finance leads across South-East Asia now facing their first serious disclosures, the gap is rarely ambition - it is the plumbing: data that reconciles, methodologies that hold up, numbers that survive scrutiny. That is where DualMinds' sustainability reporting support sits - applying the same financial discipline to non-financial data, so the report reflects the business rather than a best guess.
Sustainability reporting has stopped being a communications exercise dressed up in numbers. It is an accounting exercise - and the sooner it is treated like one, the more the numbers are actually worth.
Source: The Critical Role Accountants Play in Sustainability - Novid Parsi, IMA (Institute of Management Accountants), 2026.
