How to Prepare Your First ASRS Climate Report | Practical Guide

If you’ve just found out your organisation falls under Australia’s mandatory climate reporting regime, you’re probably feeling a mix of urgency and uncertainty. You’re not alone. Most companies we work with at NetNada had the same reaction — followed by the same question: where do we actually start?

This guide walks you through the practical steps to go from zero to a credible first climate report. No jargon overload, no scare tactics — just the process, the pitfalls, and the shortcuts that actually work. By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of what needs to happen, who needs to be involved, and what you can realistically get done in the next 90 days.

Who needs to report and when

Australia’s mandatory climate reporting legislation divides companies into three groups based on key business metrics like revenue, assets, and employee count. Each group has different reporting start dates.

The best sources for checking your specific deadlines and thresholds are the Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB) and the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD). I’d also recommend putting the legislation itself into an LLM or research tool to pull out the specific clauses relevant to your business — it’s genuinely one of the fastest ways to get clarity on what applies to you.

If you’re looking to upskill your team on the fundamentals, consider bringing in a consultant to run a focused session, or enrolling in self-paced courses like the ones on NetNada Academy. Either way, building foundational knowledge early saves enormous time later.

Step 1: Assess your people before you assess your reporting

Here’s something most guides skip: before you worry about data, software, or report templates, you need to figure out who is going to own this project internally.

Many organisations are lucky enough to already have someone with a sustainability background — maybe they’ve been fielding customer requests for environmental data, or they pursued carbon neutrality off their own initiative a few years ago, or they’ve been running internal initiatives like sustainable materials or reusable cups. The specifics depend on your industry.

The questions to ask about this person are:

Do they want to do this full-time? Mandatory reporting is not a side project. It requires dedicated focus, at least for the initial build.

Do they have the right skills? Not just technical knowledge of emissions — though that matters — but the soft skills to manage upward. Can they present to the C-suite or board? Can they handle procurement if you need to buy software or engage consultants? Can they run cross-functional workshops?

What’s their ambition level? Someone who sees this as a career-defining opportunity will approach it very differently from someone who inherited it because no one else raised their hand.

If the current person isn’t the right fit — or if there’s no one at all — you may need to hire. But don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Someone with strong project management skills and a willingness to learn can be more effective than a sustainability expert who can’t navigate internal politics.

Step 2: Study example reports before you build your own

Before you write a single word of your own report, go and read what others have done. This is the fastest shortcut to understanding what “good enough” looks like.

You can use NetNada’s database of published climate reports, or simply search for a competitor — ideally someone larger than you who’s already reported under AASB alignment. Look at their structure, their level of detail, the way they’ve handled sections they’re clearly still maturing on. You’ll quickly realise that no first report is perfect, and that’s actually the point.

If you engage an external software provider or consultant, they’ll typically provide substantial education during the sales process itself. Companies like NetNada offer a mix of approaches — either bringing internal expertise to guide your team, collaborating with your existing consultant, or providing structured courses that your sustainability lead can work through independently.

The key output from this step is a clear-eyed understanding of the gap between where you are and where a credible first report needs to be.

Step 3: Understand the four pillars

The AASB S1 and S2 climate reporting standards cover four pillars. Every section of your report will map back to one of these:

Governance doesn’t need to be complex for your first year. Setting up a sustainability or ESG committee that meets quarterly, with a clear owner and documented meeting notes, gives you a governance structure you can point to. Name specific people as owners of specific deliverables. This is also something you can start immediately — you don’t need to wait for the data to be ready.

Strategy — For Group 2 companies in their first year, the climate scenario analysis component is actually easier than people think, because it starts as qualitative rather than quantitative. Don’t get bogged down here — most companies overthink this section.

Risk and opportunities — This typically involves workshops with leadership and operations teams to map physical risks (floods, heat, bushfires) and transition risks (regulation, market shifts, technology changes) against your specific operations and geography.

Metrics and targets — This is the heaviest section in terms of data work, but with the right software platform guiding you through the process, it becomes manageable.

Step 4: Tackle the data collection

The emissions analysis is the most labour-intensive part of the report. Here’s where the data typically lives and who holds it:

Scope 2 (electricity and energy): Your energy invoices sit with your asset manager, office manager, or finance team. Ideally, you want the actual invoices from your energy provider showing kilowatt hours consumed — not just the dollar amount. If you can’t get invoices, your building management system may have consumption data, but you’ll need to request access from whoever manages those portals. The finance team often has oversight on what was paid, but the activity-level data (actual consumption) may not have been captured in the accounting process.

Scope 3 (supply chain and indirect): For companies doing spend-based analysis — which is most companies in their first year — this data lives with your finance team, inside your accounting software or ERP. Some categories need more granularity: flights can come from your corporate travel portal, waste data from your waste contractor, employee commute from a staff survey, and significant materials from invoices or bills of materials (particularly relevant in construction).

Scope 1 (direct emissions): If you operate vehicles, fuel data may already be in your ERP if you’re tracking litres consumed. If you have industrial equipment or processes, you may need machine data or operational assumptions.

Step 5: Set a realistic timeline

Based on our work with companies ranging from small operations to national businesses with 50+ locations, here’s what we’ve seen:

Here’s the thing most people don’t realise: the majority of the elapsed time is waiting, not working. You book a risk and opportunities workshop — it gets pushed back two weeks. You send materials for review — feedback takes another two weeks. You request data from finance — they’re busy with month-end. You find a data gap for some sites — you have to go back and model it or source it from somewhere else.

The actual creation of the report is far quicker than the organisational coordination around it. Plan for that.

The mistakes that cost you time, money, and credibility

Having worked with companies across hospitality, construction, telecommunications, commercial services, and more, these are the patterns I see repeatedly:

1. Overspending on software and consulting before you understand your needs

I say this as someone who sells technology solutions for climate reporting: you do not need to buy every bell and whistle in year one. You don’t know how you’re going to use half the features yet. These platforms are not ERPs — they don’t require 6-month implementations and complex integrations. For a Group 2 company, you don’t need full-fledged API integrations pulling data from every system. Have two or three conversations with providers, see who’s available, see who actually responds to your emails quickly, and get started. Judge vendors by how approachable they are and whether they have the expertise to get you all the way — not by the length of their feature list.

2. Failing to document as you go

3. Treating this as a one-person side project

Mandatory climate reporting touches finance, operations, procurement, legal, and the board. If you assign it to one person without giving them authority or air cover, it will stall at every internal handoff point.

4. Waiting for perfect data before starting

Your first report will have data gaps. That’s expected and acceptable — as long as you document your assumptions and modelling approaches. Don’t let the pursuit of perfect Scope 3 data prevent you from publishing a credible first report on time.

5. Getting intimidated by flashy reports from larger companies

Some Group 1 companies have published impressive, polished climate reports. Good for them — they’ve had more time and more resources. You don’t need a flashy report. You need an honest, well-structured, audit-ready one.

A message for boards

If you sit on a board and you’re just learning about ASRS obligations, here are the things that matter:

First — do you sit on another board going through the same journey? Whatever you learn here, you can share there, and vice versa. Cross-pollinate.

Second — frame this as business resilience, not compliance. A lot of what gets worked through in the reporting process may turn out to be immaterial for your business in the short term. Your job is to explain that clearly — and to identify where there are genuine opportunities to become more resilient, win new contracts, or develop new revenue lines.

Third — assign clear responsibility. If nobody at the C-level has a direct line of connection with the person doing this work, here’s what will happen: you’ll see a draft report one month before it needs to be released, you’ll get a few comments from your auditor, you’ll panic, and you’ll ask why you didn’t invest more in this earlier. You don’t want a surprise bill from EY, PwC, or BDO to fix something that should have been built properly from the start.

What you can do this week

You don’t need to wait for a board decision or a budget approval to start moving:

But whatever you do — don’t get intimidated by the flashy reports. You don’t need a flash report to make this happen. You need a credible start.

If you’d like to see how NetNada helps companies go from zero to audit-ready climate reporting, book a walkthrough at netnada.com. We also offer free courses through NetNada Academy to help your team build the fundamentals.