Australia has led the world in implementing mandatory climate reporting and assurance. The staggered rollout required large corporations to report from January 2025 and medium entities from July this year. All remaining entities must be on board from July 2027.

How Australia’s organisations and professional advisors have navigated this significant change was the topic of a seminar hosted by The Business School’s Sustainable Business Hub, Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (AUASB) and Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ).

Introducing the event, Professor Arunima Malik, the School’s Sustainable Business Hub lead, said: “We are now beyond ‘are we prepared?’ for the new reporting regime. We are now asking what prepared really means in practice?”

The event was chaired by Associate Professor Shan Zhou from the School of Accounting Governance and Regulation, who recently published two studies on the preparedness of Australian Entities and Auditors for climate-related reporting. 

“Australia is the best example of what is happening in the world of sustainable reporting,” Associate Professor Zhou told the forum.

Four sector-leading professionals addressed the seminar: Lauren Davey, Executive Manager, Investor Relations with CBA, Karen McWilliams, Sustainability Leader, CA ANZ, Doug Niven, CEO, Auditing and Assurance Standards Board and Professor Roger Simnett, Monash University.

Four key learnings:

• If it’s not documented, it’s not done.
• Everyone is doing everything for the first time, at the same time, and there is a lot of learning to share.
• There’s a gap between what the entity is thinking and what the auditors are thinking.
• Australia is a leader in the field of international sustainability auditing standards so we have the ability to publish well.

In one generation, Vietnam has moved from one of the poorest countries to a middle income manufacturing and innovation economy of more than 100 million people.

The Business School’s three Research Hubs combined to host a forum exploring collaborations, ongoing and potential, between Vietnam and Australia.

Professor Thu-Anh Nguyen, Executive Director of the Sydney Vietnam Institute, told the event the Institute has collaborations with more than 300 institutions in Vietnam including high level collaborations with government ministries meaning “we can translate your research into policy, innovations and operational solutions.” Professor Nguyen told the forum.

Professor Minh Ngoc Tran told the forum that Vietnam is becoming a regional hub for data science and AI. Since 2023 Professor Ngoc has helped organise an annual Summer School on mathematical statistics which has become the largest annual conference in Vietnam. 

Dr Nate Zettna spoke about the development of a Southeast Asian AI Barometer, a collaboration across five faculties at the University including the Business School. The project’s key question ‘Is AI good for public infrastructure?’ is exploring the public’s trust in AI across SE Asia including in Vietnam.

“Our goal is to develop an evidence-based tool that helps governments and organisations better understand public attitudes towards AI, to help them make more responsible and informed decisions about adoption,’ Dr Zettna said.

The nexus between climate change and modern slavery is a specific research concern for Dr Martijn Boersma who told the conference that 7% of farmland in Vietnam will be submerged by one meter of sea level rise in the near future, whilst almost 400,000 Vietnamese people are compelled into either forced labour or forced marriage.

“We need to make sure that the benefits of economic growth are shared fairly with the people that manufacture so many of the things that we use every day.”

Dr Rosea Taghikhah is part of an international collaboration that is developing a formula that will help determine if land should be allocated to food or energy production depending on the quality of the land and the need for food security.

Associate Professor Sandra Alday (Sydney Southeast Asia Centre) has been researching Vietnam for more than 12 years. She credits the country’s economic vitality to the dynamism of female-led social enterprises. She is currently exploring what builds resilience in female entrepreneurs in the Philippines and is keen to expand the project into Vietnam.

Kevin Hobgood Brown (SVI chair) said culture “is everything” when it comes to ensuring a successful project in Vietnam. “I've never worked on a project anywhere in Asia that has failed because they got the service wrong or the project wrong, or put it in the wrong place, or priced everything wrong. You've got so many experts working on all of those areas, they’re almost always right. But when projects have failed, it’s due to cultural reasons.”

The Business School’s Sustainable Business Hub, in partnership with Net Zero Institute (NZI) launched the Financing the Net Zero Transition: Ideas for Australia white paper, showcasing our role in shaping responsible leadership for Australia’s net zero future.

Opening the event, Professor Deanna D’Alessandro, Director of the Net Zero Institute, framed the challenge facing Australia as one of delivery: how to enable system‑level change at a time of constrained funding, rising expectations, and growing climate, security and productivity pressures. 

“Financing is tricky,” Professor D'Alessandro said. “Not because capital isn't necessarily available, but because aligning capital, with credible investable pathways, is difficult. Universities are uniquely placed to de-risk the transition through trusted, independent expertise.”

The white paper is an ideas document designed to surface tensions, challenge assumptions, and focus attention on practical pathways that are often overlooked. 

The keynote address by Professor Hugh Durrant‑Whyte, NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, highlighted the complexity of Australia’s transition challenge, pointing to the need to better align finance, engineering capability, planning frameworks and social licence, particularly in hard‑to‑abate sectors such as energy, transport, steel, cement and critical minerals.

A panel discussion facilitated by Professor D’Alessandro explored how capital can be mobilised more effectively to support the transition. Panellists included Amanda Taylor (HSBC), Alvin Chandra (Asian Development Bank), Jarrod McDonald (UniSuper), Nikki Kemp (Singapore Green Finance Centre) and Ratri Wakeling (Pollination). Panellists emphasised the need to move from project‑by‑project financing to coordinated, programmatic approaches that can crowd in private capital at scale, and highlighted data, insurance and social licence as critical enablers of investable transition pathways.

The white paper was developed through a co‑partnered effort between the NZI and the Business School, with leadership from Dr Danielle Kent and Dr Gordon Weiss. Strong attendance and engagement from industry and government underscored the opportunity for the University of Sydney to play a convening role, bridging research, policy and investment to help close key gaps in Australia’s net zero transition.

Delivering a sustainable health care system involves decarbonising supply chains, limiting hospital admissions only to people who will benefit from treatment there and addressing staff burnout. 

The health care sector is directly or indirectly responsible for 5.4% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, Professor Madeleine Skellern, from the Australian Centre for Disease Control, told participants at the recent ‘Shaping Sustainable Health Systems’ forum, co-hosted by the Business School’s three Thematic Research Hubs. 

“Most emissions occur in the supply chain – meaning clinicians need to be better informed about the emissions impact of the medicines and medical devices they order,” Professor Skellern said. 

Environmental sustainability and climate resilience should become part of the BAU of care delivery, starting with clinical training, Professor Skellern said. She noted the pioneering work of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, for example its August 2025 Healthcare Resilience and Sustainability Module, towards this goal.

Building a more sustainable health care sector also means reducing the turnover of the care workforce, Annie Butler, the Federal Secretary of the Australian Nurses and Midwives Association said. “Our number one issue is retention, which is intrinsically linked to job quality – and for our members that means improved workloads and being able to deliver safe care.”

Healthcare workers have psychological injury claims at twice the rate of any other sectors, Professor Helena Nguyen told the forum. “This is an unsustainable financial crisis.” 

While burnout is legally recognised as a health and safety risk, Professor Nguyen urges organisations not to treat it just as a compliance issue. “That’s like having the ambulance waiting at the bottom of the cliff.”

Professor Nguyen cited her work with iCare as an example of an organisation that is working with its frontline staff to codesign better quality work practices. “This produced what might seem like small solutions – like how staff can do a better handover - but the staff own the solution rather than having it imposed on them which is usually what happens.”

Professor John Buchanan told the forum the sector needs to confront its ‘policy insanity paradox’ – of doing the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome.

“For over 100 years it has been recognised more effort needs to be devoted to prevention and the problems of chronic disease.   We don’t need more advocacy for making these priority concerns. Rather, we need to understand why ‘the obvious’ solutions have not been adopted.”

“A typical reform process looks at what governments or management can do. Comparative research on mental health shows that where managers work constructively with unions, services improve in both quality and scale. But where  managers are primarily loyal to ‘the budget’, services are seriously compromised. Active collaborations with unions and professional associations is vital effective health sector reconstruction.