By Sam Riley
You’ve tamed Work Health and Safety (WHS), Essential Safety Measures (ESM) and the Annual Fire Safety Statement (AFSS), but AASB S2 Climate-related Disclosures – a mandatory standard under the Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) – is a different kind of compliance beast. Get it right, and you become the chief financial officer’s best friend.
If your financial year started on 1 July, the AASB S2 requires your immediate attention. The numbers that regulators expect audited, board-signed and lodged alongside the financial statements are those your facilities team already collates every day across energy use, water consumption, waste management and refrigerant leaks – the raw activity behind Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
AASB S2 hasn’t created new data to manage. It’s taken data that facilities teams have collected for years, for entirely
different reasons – running the plant, keeping the lights on, paying the power bill – and decided it now belongs in a
document that gets the same scrutiny as the balance sheet.
Facilities teams didn’t ask for this. But whether it’s in the job description yet or not, they’re now part of the compliance function.
Why facilities, specifically? Because sustainability reporting isn’t about intentions; it’s about what actually happens inside your buildings. A board can commit to a sustainability plan. A sustainability team can write a strategy.
Finance can model what emissions will cost and its impacts. None of it means much without accurate, real-world data
on those buildings. That data has always lived with facilities. What’s changed is who’s relying on it and how carefully it now gets checked.
This is where most organisations get caught out. Facilities data was never built for an audit; it was built to keep the building running. So it lives in spreadsheets, siloed systems and utility portals nobody reconciles. Nobody owns a number from start to finish, so when someone asks how confident you are in a figure, the honest answer is often ‘not very’. That’s not a sustainability problem. It’s a basic governance problem wearing a sustainability mask.
The fix isn’t another piece of software bolted onto the same broken handoffs. It’s getting three teams that have never had
to speak the same language – facilities, finance and sustainability – to agree on one dataset, one set of definitions and
one owner per number. The facilities team knows what the meter reads. Sustainability knows what the framework demands. Finance knows what actually matters to the bottom line.
Right now, most businesses have three different, half-right answers to the same question. And AASB S2 demands one.
That means facilities managers need to be in the room earlier than they’re used to. Not as the person who gets a panicked email asking for numbers, but as the named owner of specific pieces of the disclosure, held to the same standard finance already meets. This is also where automation and AI genuinely help.
Facilities management has spent years being judged on uptime and cost per square metre. Now it’s also being judged on whether its data holds up under scrutiny. That’s a much bigger job than most teams have been given credit, or
resourcing, for.
It’s also, however, the best opportunity this profession has been handed in years. Lining up energy and waste data across every site often surfaces remarkable cost savings, like two near-identical buildings on wildly different power rates, because nobody ever compared the bills. Facilities teams who lead this work don’t just produce a compliant number; they hand finance a shortlist of savings nobody else could have found.
Get ahead of this, and the chief financial officer stops seeing facilities as a cost centre and starts seeing it as the team that finds the money nobody else could.
Sam Riley is the co-founder and CEO at Drova
Image: Supplied
This article first appeared in the September 2026 edition of FM magazine. To download the entire edition for free, click here.
Read more: Meet Your Local FM: Peter Powell, director for Technical Services at CBRE
