Deloitte’s Josette Soh: Sustainability leaders must look beyond compliance
She discussed the strategies that help organisations build resilience and deliver sustainability outcomes.
In Southeast Asia, sustainability is now a business imperative. Regulations have evolved, reporting requirements have become more rigorous, whilst investor expectations have continued to grow. Organisations are faced with these changes and are under pressure to turn their sustainability commitments into real outcomes.
Providing insight into how organisations can navigate this landscape is Josette Soh, Sustainability & Specialized Assurance Partner at Deloitte Singapore. She has more than 19 years of professional services experience that includes advising multinational corporations, listing companies, state-owned enterprises, and government-linked organisations in Southeast Asia.
Soh, who has a background in both external audit and sustainability advisory, works closely with boards, executive management, and finance teams. She has expertise in strengthening sustainability governance, improving climate and sustainability reporting, developing decarbonisation strategies, conducting greenhouse gas accounting and double materiality assessments, and preparing organisations for evolving global reporting standards such as the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) standards.
As a judge at the ESGBusiness Awards 2026, Soh shares her perspectives on how businesses can move beyond compliance, build stronger governance, and create lasting value through sustainability.
As ESG regulations continue to evolve globally, how are businesses in Southeast Asia responding to these changes?
What we're seeing across Southeast Asia is a shift from "if" to "when and how." Most businesses no longer question whether ESG regulations will affect them—they're now focused on how to respond effectively amidst an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.
This is being driven by factors such as the adoption of ISSB-based reporting, the expansion of carbon pricing and carbon taxes across the region, and the growing overlap amongst regulatory regimes and stakeholder expectations. As a result, companies need to navigate multiple reporting requirements whilst maintaining consistent, decision-useful information.
The organisations that are leading are treating regulation as “the floor rather than the ceiling”. They're investing in strong sustainability data infrastructure, upskilling their people, integrating AI into sustainability processes and operations, and, importantly, shifting the conversation from compliance to value creation.
Ultimately, sustainability initiatives need to demonstrate clear business value. Frameworks such as Deloitte's Sustainability Fusion Framework, which links sustainability initiatives to enterprise value through cost reduction, risk mitigation, revenue growth and business resilience, help organisations make better investment decisions and embed sustainability into core business strategy rather than treating it as a reporting exercise.
Which industries do you believe are making the greatest progress in sustainability, and which still have significant room for improvement?
Financial services and real estate are arguably ahead of the curve in Southeast Asia. Financial institutions have been integrating climate risk into lending, investment and underwriting decisions for several years, whilst the real estate sector has had a natural entry point through green buildings, energy efficiency and asset resilience, where the business case is often clear and measurable.
We're also seeing encouraging progress in energy, materials and heavy manufacturing. These sectors start from a much higher emissions baseline, so whilst the transition journey is longer, many organisations are making significant investments in decarbonisation and operational transformation. For hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation, shipping and parts of the energy sector, the challenge is often less about ambition and more about the availability of technology, supporting infrastructure and commercially viable transition pathways.
Where I see the greatest opportunity for improvement is amongst the mid-market and SME supply chain. Increasingly, these companies are receiving Scope 3 data requests from their larger customers, but many still lack the resources, data infrastructure and technical capabilities to respond effectively. Building these capabilities is becoming a business imperative — not just to meet reporting expectations, but to remain competitive and continue participating in global supply chains, where sustainability performance is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for doing business.
Ultimately, the leaders are not defined by their industry, but by their mindset. The organisations making the greatest progress are embedding sustainability into business strategy, investing in robust data and governance, and demonstrating measurable value creation rather than treating ESG purely as a compliance exercise.
What role does governance play in ensuring sustainability commitments translate into measurable business outcomes?
Governance is the difference between a sustainability strategy and a sustainability aspiration. I've seen plenty of companies with genuinely ambitious net-zero targets that never move the needle, and in almost every case the common thread isn't lack of ambition — it's lack of accountability structure underneath it.
Three things matter most in practice. First, board-level ownership: sustainability oversight needs to sit with a committee that has real teeth, not be delegated entirely to a sustainability officer with no budget authority. Second, integration into performance management — targets that show up in executive remuneration and business unit KPIs get resourced very differently from targets that live only in a standalone report. Third, assurance and controls — as external assurance becomes increasingly common and mandatory in some jurisdictions, companies are having to build the same rigour around sustainability data that they've long had around financial data: clear data lineage, defined controls, and internal audit involvement.
Where governance is strong, commitments tend to survive leadership changes and market downturns. Where it's weak, sustainability becomes the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
What strategies can companies adopt to strengthen stakeholder confidence through sustainability reporting?
The single biggest driver of stakeholder trust is consistency between what a company reports and what it actually does.
Get assurance-ready early rather than wait until it's mandatory for your reporting tier. Companies that treat external assurance as a checkbox exercise the year it becomes compulsory tend to find embarrassing gaps in their data; companies that build the muscle two or three years ahead tend to have far cleaner numbers and far more credible reports.
Be honest about what you don't yet know. Overly polished reports with no acknowledged gaps or challenges tend to trigger more scepticism — investors and NGOs are sophisticated enough to notice when a report reads like pure marketing.
Connect sustainability disclosure to financial disclosure. Where the two tell a coherent, integrated story — rather than living in separate documents with separate narratives — stakeholder confidence goes up significantly.
And finally, avoid overclaiming. Greenwashing risk is a live enforcement priority in this region now, and the reputational and regulatory cost of an overstated claim is far higher than the cost of a modest, well-evidenced one.
What emerging sustainability issues do you believe business leaders should begin preparing for today?
Nature and biodiversity reporting is coming after climate, following a similar trajectory to what we saw with Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) to International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Frameworks like the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) are gaining traction, and companies with significant land use, agriculture, or supply chain exposure to deforestation risk should start building the data capability now rather than waiting for it to become mandatory.
Transition plans are moving from "nice to have" to expected disclosure. It's no longer enough to state a target; boards are increasingly expected to show the credible pathway and capital allocation behind it.
Human capital and social metrics — fair labour practices, supply chain human rights, just transition considerations for workers in carbon-intensive industries — are getting more regulatory and investor attention, particularly as social factors become harder to separate from climate transition risk.
And I'd add AI's own environmental footprint. As companies scale AI adoption, data centre energy and water consumption is starting to show up as a material line item in corporate emissions inventories, which is a slightly ironic but very real emerging issue.
Companies that start building capability in these areas now, ahead of formal mandates, will have a real head start over those who wait for the regulation to force their hand.
As a judge for the ESGBusiness Awards 2026, which types of sustainability innovations are you most excited to see from this year’s nominees?
What excites me most isn't the biggest or flashiest initiative — it's evidence of genuine integration: sustainability innovation that's been embedded into the core business model rather than bolted on as a side project. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing entries that demonstrate measurable outcomes, not just good intentions — real emissions reductions, real efficiency gains, and real supply chain transformation, backed by credible data.
Next, given where the region is heading, I'd love to see strong nominees in nature-related innovation and circular economy models — those are areas where Southeast Asia, given its resource base and manufacturing footprint, has real potential to lead rather than simply follow global standards set elsewhere.
