ACCA Chief Executive Helen Brand is in Manila this week for the Asean Business and Investment Summit, ahead of the 49th Asean Summit. Her visit follows the launch of ACCA’s report Asia Pacific builds a sustainable future on the sidelines of the 33rd APEC Summit. The report finds that Asia Pacific is leading the world in adopting global sustainability reporting standards, but that disclosure is still widely treated as a compliance exercise.
In this written interview, Helen Brand discusses what it will take to turn disclosure into decisions, why Europe’s retreat on sustainability reporting does not change the direction of travel in Asia Pacific, and what policymakers can do to help.
Europe has just scaled back CSRD through the Omnibus package. Does that let Asia Pacific off the hook?
The opposite. About 80 per cent of Asean economies measured by GDP have adopted or plan to adopt the ISSB standards. Add China and you have economies representing close to half of global GDP aligned to a global baseline of reporting sustainability information. This is not a region waiting to be told what good practice looks like. The region is driving its own agenda on building a more sustainable future and this will not be scaled back just because the EU has narrowed the scope of CSRD.
You’ve said adoption is the easy part. What’s the hard part?
Our research finds that in many jurisdictions disclosure is still regarded as a compliance exercise. This is not unusual in any initial phase of adoption, but it does not resolve itself. The gap closes through deliberate effort, and eventually sustainability information will translate into insights, action and impact.
Not all finance functions are the active drivers that they should be. Controls over sustainability data are not as strong as the controls we take for granted around financial information. So, you get a great deal of information generated that never reaches a capital allocation decision, a budget, or a risk register.
Where does that gap cost the region most?
In one word – resilience. Businesses aren’t decarbonising as fast as they should be, leaving them exposed to rising fossil fuel prices from geopolitical conflicts. Projects fail to reach bankability not because the technology is unsound but because the solution requires a blend of finance and policy levers.
As temperatures rise with a super El Nino, heat stress will not only affect labour productivity and health but also crop yield and quality. Water may prove to be the defining risk of this century in Asia Pacific. Floods alone accounted for more than half of the 7.2 billion people affected by disasters in the region from 1970 to 2024. The devastation caused in Nepal this year is yet another reminder of this.
Europe’s due diligence rules reach into Asian supply chains. Is that a good thing?
In principle, yes. In practice, there is a risk that the costs of compliance are disproportionately borne by Asia Pacific suppliers rather than shared with their EU buyers. Responsibility cannot travel in one direction while the commercial benefit travels in the other. Fifteen countries in this region have begun implementing the UN Guiding Principles. They are doing serious work. EU buyers should be investing in that capability, not simply off-loading it.
AI is the region’s biggest growth story and a growing consumer of power and water. How do you reconcile that?
You don’t reconcile it, you account for it. AI is an amplifier in both directions. It can reduce sustainability risks through the solutions it enables or worsen it through what it consumes. In Malaysia, data centres are already competing with agriculture for water. Elsewhere, demand is extending the life of coal plants that should have retired. If consumption and emissions are not measured and disclosed, we are booking the benefits of the digital economy without recognising its liabilities. Our profession has a role in fixing that.
What is ACCA actually doing, beyond advocacy?
Building capability, because the constraint is people. Expertise in sustainability reporting is not growing fast enough to meet expanding requirements, and six Asean member states have yet to commit to alignment with international sustainability reporting standards — a two-speed Asean would undermine the integration the region has spent decades building. We have long embedded sustainability into the ACCA Qualification, and we’re stepping up the focus on it in our redesigned qualification being introduced in 2027. We work through Asean-BAC, AFA and CAPA to get consistency across markets.
And the ask of policymakers?
Accountability is easier to demand than to enable. Policymakers can build more programmes to grow preparers capability and assurance capacity, enhance data comparability across borders, and make requirements proportionate to the organisations expected to meet them. Get these right and disclosures can turn to insights, actions and impact. Get them wrong and you have reporting without accountability or integrity, which serves no one.
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