More Reporting, Less Information
Sustainability disclosure in Asia has cleared the first hurdle. The harder one is whether any of it changes a decision.
Somewhere between the first GRI report and the first ISSB filing, sustainability reporting stopped being an act of persuasion and became an act of compliance. That shift was necessary. It may also have cost us something.
I have spent the past year working with listed companies and investors across Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia as ISSB-aligned reporting takes hold, and running a research project with NUS students on how investors in this region actually use ESG information. The pattern that keeps surfacing is not a shortage of disclosure. It is the opposite. Companies are producing more sustainability information than at any point in the history of the practice, and the people who are supposed to use it are still asking basic questions about the business that the reports do not answer.
That gap is worth taking seriously, because it is where the next phase of this work will be decided.
The volume paradox
A 2026 study by Kim, Li, Feldman, Feldman and Liu analysed more than 15,000 sustainability disclosure documents from over 2,100 companies spanning two decades. The authors asked a deceptively simple question: as sustainability reporting became mainstream, did the disclosures get better?
Their finding is uncomfortable. As reporting became widespread, reports became less specific, less quantitatively dense and more promotional, even as the visual apparatus of rigour (tables, charts, figures) expanded. Framework adoption showed mixed and non-uniform associations with disclosure quality. The study found no consistent evidence that adopting a framework, by itself, improved the dimensions of quality it measured.
I would read that finding carefully rather than dramatically. It does not say frameworks are useless, and it does not say every report has deteriorated. What it says is that reporting activity and information quality are separate variables, and we have been treating them as one.
This is familiar territory for anyone who works on organisational legitimacy. When a practice becomes an expectation, conformity to the practice starts to deliver its own reward. The reporting becomes the achievement. The behaviour it was meant to evidence quietly detaches from it. My doctoral research traced exactly this dynamic in international oil and gas companies, where the distance between symbolic conformity and substantive change was often widest precisely where disclosure was most sophisticated.
What investors in this region told us
Alongside the literature, we ran our own work. The InCorp Global and NUS project, "Decoupling ESG from Regulation: Building an Investor-Driven ESG Framework for Asia Pacific," combined regulatory analysis with interviews of 12 practitioners across five APAC markets.
Twelve interviews is a qualitative sample, and I will not stretch it further than it goes. It cannot tell us how common a view is across the region. It can tell us what experienced users of this information find missing, and on one point the responses were unanimous. Not one respondent regarded ESG disclosures as consistently linked to revenue, costs or valuation.
One practitioner put it in a single sentence:
"Impact on revenue and cost is the missing linkage."
The other concerns clustered around transition-plan credibility, comparability of ESG data across issuers, and a sense that reporting in APAC is still driven by regulators rather than by the people meant to use it. Different symptoms, same underlying condition.
Two gaps
It helps to separate what is actually going wrong, because the two failures need different fixes.
The disclosure quality gap is about the information itself. Can a reader tell what happened, how much, compared with what, and with what degree of confidence? The large-scale evidence suggests this does not improve automatically as reporting spreads or as more frameworks are cited.
The financial linkage gap is about connection. Can a material sustainability issue be traced to the economic drivers that management and investors already use: revenue, cost, assets, financing, capital expenditure? Our interviews suggest this is where APAC reporting is weakest.
A company can close the first gap and leave the second wide open. A beautifully assured, highly specific emissions inventory that never touches capital allocation is a good disclosure and a poor management tool.
What closing the second gap looks like
Three areas make the difference visible.
Transition plans. A 2030 or 2050 target carries almost no information on its own. A decision-useful plan explains the operational changes required, the investment needed to deliver them, the milestones progress will be measured against, the assumptions the pathway depends on, and what happens if it slips. One of our respondents asked the question that ought to be standard at board level: "Does the transition plan have proper target and CAPEX alignment?" The test is no longer whether a target exists. It is whether the capital plan agrees with it.
Climate risk. Naming flood, heat or water stress exposure satisfies part of a reporting requirement. Managing it requires knowing which sites and supply chains are exposed, what disruption looks like operationally, the revenue and cost implications, the adaptation spend required, and the horizon over which any of this becomes financially significant. The analysis earns its cost at the point it connects hazard to exposure to action.
Scope 3. The same dataset supports two entirely different exercises. One calculates the number and reports it. The other asks where the significant dependencies sit, which materials and suppliers drive the footprint, where future carbon cost will land, where supplier capability is thinnest, and how customer expectations may reshape revenue. The first produces a disclosure. The second produces procurement and resilience intelligence that happens to also produce a disclosure.
Regulation sets the floor
None of this is an argument against the direction SGX, Bursa or MAS is taking. A regulatory baseline does real work: it establishes minimum expectations, improves consistency, and makes comparison possible in a way voluntary reporting never managed.
The risk is treating the floor as the ceiling. Completing an ISSB disclosure, a Scope 3 assessment or a climate risk analysis is an output. Whether any of it changed strategy, procurement, operations or capital allocation is the outcome, and only one of those two things is currently being measured.
Five questions for boards
For directors reviewing a sustainability report, "have we met the requirements?" is now the easy question. These five are the harder ones, and they are the ones I would put on the agenda:
What has the organisation learned? What do we understand about this business that was not visible before the analysis?
What decision has changed? Has this information moved strategy, investment, operations, procurement or risk management?
Where is the financial linkage? Can material issues be connected to revenue, costs, assets, financing or CAPEX?
Are setbacks visible? Does the report explain missed targets and deteriorating indicators alongside the good news?
What happens next? Are there named owners, milestones and actions attached to what we just disclosed?
A report that cannot answer these is not a failed report. It is a report doing a different job from the one we assumed it was doing.
From disclosure to decision
The first phase of sustainability reporting was about getting companies to disclose. That phase has largely succeeded in this region, and it deserves credit for that.
The second phase is about whether those disclosures are credible, financially connected and capable of changing something. The large-scale evidence says volume and framework adoption will not deliver it on their own. Our APAC interviews say the financial linkage is not there yet. Both point the same way.
The sustainability report should be the output of a stronger management system, not the objective of one.
So the leadership question is no longer "are we reporting?"
It is: what can we decide differently because of what we now know?
References
Kim, H., Li, N., Feldman, R., Feldman, Y. and Liu, Y. (2026), "What Sustainability Disclosures Disclose."
InCorp Global and NUS research project, "Decoupling ESG from Regulation: Building an Investor-Driven ESG Framework for Asia Pacific."
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