Chris Wood

Before becoming an ESG reporting leader at Deloitte, Chris spent a large part of his career helping companies work through complex transitions involving accounting transactions, new standard implementations, and GAAP conversions.

While he enjoys helping individual companies meet their compliance requirements and align their reporting to their strategy, Chris considers the ESG reporting journey a vital part of reaching a bigger goal.

“This isn’t about compliance—it’s about changing our future by making decisions differently. That starts with getting the reporting right so that we have the information necessary to inform those decisions.”

Chris is an optimist and an entrepreneur at heart. “We have a choice here—we can make a better future for ourselves and for future generations. That excites me and I want to be a part of how we get there.”

Having spent much of his career working with financial services, Chris is inspired by some of Canada’s most influential leaders on ESG and sustainable finance, including Jonathan Simmons, Chief Financial and Strategy Officer at OMERS and a founding member of the Canadian Chapter of the Accounting for Sustainability (A4S), and Barbara Zvan, president and CEO of University Pension Plan Ontario, a leading voice on sustainable investing.

“For me, it’s like we said in our paper ESG: Past the tipping point—‘Cash (alone) is no longer king. Instead, profitability is now being weighed along with…how well people, our planet, and prosperity are embedded into a company’s strategy, business model, and risk management.’ It’s fascinating because now people behave in a way that would otherwise seem counterintuitive. Banks are choosing not to fund loans that would otherwise be profitable. People are choosing to buy goods even when cheaper alternatives exist. Where higher returns or cheaper goods were once considered better, that’s no longer the case today if it harms the earth and isn’t sustainable.”

Chris believes that there’s a wholesale shift in how we make decisions—as consumers, investors, and businesses—moving from dollars to dollars plus something else, and the something else is the ESG impact. “That’s the really important part here—this isn’t about new disclosure requirements, it’s about enabling better decisions. In many ways, getting the right information into the hands of stakeholders to enable those decisions is just as important as the decisions themselves.”

One of the biggest challenges in sustainability-related financial reporting is that there are multiple regulators and standard setters with separate proposals. “We have a sense of the standards that we think will apply today, but we don’t know for sure what things will look like tomorrow or even when the dust will settle. And there’s added complexity because this isn’t just an issue of individual entities, it’s about the entirety of their value chains.”

“The reporting standards are just a means to an end, not the end itself. The things I would be thinking about today are things like ‘What’s my strategy?’ and ‘What’s the story I want to be able to tell?’ and ‘What decisions do I want my stakeholders to make and what information will they need to make them?’ Once I know that, I can start to figure out what I already have and how to begin to close the gap.”