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For most of my career, the annual report was the finance team's job. The board read it, asked a few questions, signed it, moved on. Climate wasn't even in it. That's over. In Singapore, from this year, every listed company has to put its emissions inside that report. Malaysia is doing the same thing, with the international standards. And here's the part most directors haven't sat with: that report is approved at board level. Their level. So let me say it plainly. You are now putting your name next to a set of climate numbers. Numbers about your energy, your supply chain, your exposure. And in most boards I talk to, nobody around that table could actually defend those numbers if someone pushed back hard. That's the real shift. It isn't that you have to report. It's that reporting turns a vague topic into a signed statement. And a signed statement is something a regulator, an investor, or a court can hold you to later. I've watched directors treat this as a box to tick. Hand it to the sustainability team, approve the document, next item. That is exactly the mistake. When you sign, you're not approving someone else's homework. You're taking personal responsibility for whether it's true. And the thing is, this cuts both ways. A board that genuinely understands its own numbers is a board that can't be ambushed. The exposure only exists if you're signing something you don't understand. So before the next report goes out, the question isn't “is it ready”. It's “could I defend every figure in here if I had to”. If the answer is no, that's not a reporting problem. That's a governance problem, and it has your name on it.

I've sat in a lot of board meetings where the word “sustainability” gets said out loud. And you can feel the room shift. Half the people file it under ethics. The other half file it under communications. Almost nobody files it where it actually belongs, which is under risk. That's the whole misunderstanding. And in this region, it's an expensive one. Let me give it to you the way I'd give it to any board I've run. A factory that runs out of water isn't an ethical problem. It's a stopped production line. A supply chain built on a crop that fails in a heatwave isn't a moral issue. It's a hole in your revenue. An asset that new regulation turns worthless isn't about being green. It's a write-down on your balance sheet. None of that is about values. It's about whether the company is still standing in twenty years. And the reason it bites harder here is that the risk isn't theoretical in Southeast Asia. The water, the heat, the new reporting rules — they're arriving faster here than almost anywhere on Earth. So a board that treats this as a values debate is busy arguing about morality while the actual risk walks straight through the front door. I'm not asking anyone to become an activist. I ran heavy industry for a living. I'm asking directors to do the thing they're already good at. Take a serious risk, put a number on it, and manage it. The day a board stops asking “do we care about this” and starts asking “what does this cost us, and when” — that's the day it starts doing its actual job.

Ask any director what a board is actually for, and you get the same answer in different words. To oversee. To see the risks the management team can't see, or would rather not look at. So here's a question I like to put to boards in this region. The city your headquarters sits in — is it sinking? For a lot of them, the honest answer is yes. North Jakarta could be almost entirely under water by 2050. Up to a third of Bangkok. Manila is going down about ten centimetres every year. These aren't forecasts from a campaign group. They're measurements. And yet, when I look at the agenda of those same boards, none of this is on it. Not as a risk line. Not as a committee item. Not anywhere. Sit with what that means. The single most physical, most visible, most measurable risk to the company — the actual ground under the building — and the one body whose entire purpose is oversight has never once put it on the table. That's the part a director should lose sleep over. Not the water. The blind spot. Because a risk you've never named is a risk you've never managed. And when it shows up — the flooded site, the supply route that's gone, the insurer who won't renew — “we didn't see it coming” is not a defence a board gets to use anymore. Not when the data sat in public for twenty years. So I don't ask boards to care about the climate. I ask them one thing. Open your risk register. If the city you operate in is sinking and it isn't in there, then the problem was never the water. It was the oversight.