Australia’s AASB S2 regime: A systemic test of corporate accountability in a warming world—where neoliberalism meets climate resilience
Original framing: “Climate risks don't stop at sector boundaries—our responses shouldn't either” — Phys.org
Marginalized communities, such as First Nations peoples and frontline workers in fossil fuel industries, have been excluded from the AASB S2 policy process, despite their direct experience with climate impacts. The voices of climate refugees, such as those displaced by the 2019-20 Australian bushfires, are absent from the regime’s ‘resilience’ narratives, which focus on corporate survival rather than human well-being. Similarly, the perspectives of young people, who will bear the brunt of unchecked climate change, are sidelined in favor of shareholder interests. Without centering these voices, the regime perpetuates the same inequities it claims to address.
Australia’s AASB S2 climate reporting regime, while marketed as a progressive step, is a neoliberal compromise that reinforces the very systems driving climate change.
By framing resilience as a corporate reporting exercise rather than a collective responsibility, the regime obscures the structural power imbalances that have historically excluded Indigenous knowledge, marginalized communities, and long-term ecological thinking from climate governance. The historical precedent of the 2009 Carbon Farming Initiative—where Indigenous land management was sidelined in favor of corporate incentives—reveals how policy failures are often repeated under new names. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and non-Western perspectives offer frameworks for climate action that prioritize relational stewardship over financial metrics, yet these are absent from AASB S2’s design. The regime’s reliance on ‘plausible scenarios’ also ignores the moral and ethical dimensions of climate justice, as highlighted by trickster readings that expose its complicity in delay tactics. To transform AASB S2 into a tool for genuine resilience, policymakers must integrate Indigenous data sovereignty, phase out fossil fuel subsidies, expand supply chain accountability, and adopt long-term horizon modeling—shifting from a corporate-centric to a community-driven approach that centers ecological and human well-being.