Beyond The Bottom Line: The CFO’s Role In Sustainability

The CFO’s responsibilities are evolving beyond traditional financial oversight to encompass sustainability strategy. While CFOs have long been tasked with ensuring an organization’s financial health – covering financial planning, reporting, compliance and risk management – new pressures are reshaping their role. Global sustainability regulations, increased investor scrutiny, heightened awareness of sustainability risks and opportunities, and the need to finance sustainability initiatives are driving CFOs to embed sustainability reporting and strategic planning into their daily decision-making processes. The 2025 Verdantix global corporate survey (set to publish later this year) reveals that 77% of sustainability leaders view the CFO as a leading or significant figure in funding sustainability strategies, ranking just behind the CEO and CSO. This represents an increase of 4 percentage points from our 2024 global corporate survey and 18 percentage points from the 2023 iteration.

What accounts for this trend? With investor-grade sustainability data now expected, sustainability teams are often turning to CFOs and finance teams for help, especially for:

• Evaluating financial materiality. The CFO’s role in evaluating financial materiality benefits both finance and sustainability teams by helping sustainability teams better assess risks and opportunities, while enabling finance teams to incorporate these factors into long-term strategic planning.
  
  
• Improving data collection. With visibility across departments, CFOs can help sustainability teams coordinate cross-functional data collection. This ensures consistency and supports the integration of sustainability metrics.
  
  
• Enhancing data governance and internal controls. As demand for investor-grade sustainability data grows, CFOs can work with sustainability leaders – who often lack expertise in this area – to bring the same rigour to sustainability information as is applied to financial data.
  
  
• Preparing for assurance. To meet requirements of many sustainability regulations, sustainability leaders are seeking external assurance – often for the first time. Finance teams, who are familiar with the assurance process due to financial regulation requirements, can provide valuable support in navigating this process.
  
  
• Conducting integrated reporting. CFOs play a key role in producing integrated reports that align financial and non-financial performance, demonstrating how the organization creates long-term value.
  
  
• Helping with sustainability reporting software selection. CFOs can work with sustainability teams to evaluate software that supports both financial and sustainability reporting.

As CFOs and finance teams dive deeper into these sustainability initiatives, however, they face a whole new set of challenges, especially given the uncertainties of the current political and economic landscape. Many are navigating the difficulties of fostering sustainability awareness across finance teams, balancing cost control with compliance amid evolving regulatory requirements, and quantifying the progress of sustainability initiatives. To explore the evolving role of CFOs and effective approaches to these challenges, see Verdantix Strategic Focus: The CFO's Influence On ESG Reporting.