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EHS has earned a new seat at the C-suite table
Here is why that should matter to every CFO.
Environmental, health, and safety compliance has moved from back-office obligation to boardroom agenda. As a CFO who has spent the past two decades living inside capital markets and investor relations, I want to explain why, and what it means for how we think about enterprise risk.
Key takeaways
The drivers of compliance risk have shifted: investors and shareholders are now as consequential as regulators, and often more so.
M&A creates a narrow window of elevated EHS exposure. How you manage that window determines whether the synergies survive.
EHS leaders who speak the language of risk and capital are earning a permanent place at the strategy table because the financial logic now demands it.
The world is tilting
The rules of regulatory risk have changed
I presented at the CFO Conferenz in March, and the theme “Power Shifts” felt exactly right. Trade blocs are fragmenting, geopolitical tensions are reshaping supply chains, and the old certainties about where regulatory pressure would come from are dissolving. In that context, I want to share something that surprised me when I moved into the EHS intelligence space.
The driving force behind EHS and sustainability compliance has quietly shifted. Regulators are still in the picture, but they are no longer the only force, and in some regions, they are actively retreating. The US has pulled back from climate disclosure requirements. The EU has trimmed its corporate sustainability reporting ambitions. If you strip away the noise, what you find is that the center of gravity has moved to investors and shareholders.
Institutional asset managers are requiring portfolio companies to report on workforce health and safety as a material risk metric, under frameworks like ISSB S1 and S2 and the relevant SASB sector standards. Goldman Sachs has projected that 2026 will be a record year for global M&A volume, and ESG and EHS performance are now standard items on due diligence checklists. That is a structural shift, and it affects every CFO in a multinational organization, regardless of sector.
The real question is: are you treating this as a compliance exercise, or as a signal about where enterprise value is actually created and protected?
M&A and post-acquisition risk
Acquisitions move fast. Compliance risk does not
I have been on both sides of M&A transactions throughout my career: divestitures and acquisitions, at companies scaling rapidly and at companies reorganizing. And there is one pattern I have seen consistently: the operational risks that cause the most damage post-close are rarely the ones that received the most attention in due diligence.
EHS compliance is a prime example. When you acquire a business, particularly one operating across multiple jurisdictions, you inherit its regulatory obligations instantly. The contracts are signed, the entity is yours, and the clock is already running on obligations across dozens of regulatory environments you may not yet fully understand. Finance teams know this dynamic well with financial controls: day one, you secure the cash, establish payment authority, and get the accounts under governance. The same logic applies to EHS compliance, but the infrastructure to do it at speed is often not in place.
Post-acquisition integration is a window of heightened exposure. Business continuity is the priority on one side; compliance normalization is urgent on the other. The companies that manage this well are the ones that can rapidly assess where the acquired entity stands against global EHS obligations, prioritize the most material gaps, and fold the new operations into a standardized compliance framework without creating a year-long disruption to the underlying business.
From a CFO perspective, this is a capital allocation question. The compliance risks embedded in an acquisition are real liabilities. If they are not surfaced and addressed quickly, they erode the synergies that made the deal attractive in the first place. I have seen it happen. The due diligence price tag looks contained; the post-close remediation does not.
The value creation argument
Compliance has a permanent seat at the table now — and it earned it
There is a version of this story I have heard told as aspiration for years. EHS leaders wanted a seat at the C-suite table. They made the case for it. Sometimes they got there. What is different now is that financial logic has caught up with the argument.
Boards and investors are asking about compliance maturity as part of capital allocation conversations. Health and safety metrics are appearing in ISSB sector standards alongside financial disclosures. Executive compensation is increasingly tied to sustainability performance. These are not soft indicators, but investor signals that CFOs know how to read.
The companies I have watched navigate this well are not treating EHS as a cost center they are trying to minimize. They are treating it as a risk management function with a direct line to enterprise value. That means having the right data at the right level of granularity, being able to demonstrate legal defensibility to auditors and investors, and building compliance into operational governance rather than bolting it on after the fact.
As a CFO, my job is to understand where value is created and where it is destroyed. Non-financial risk, including EHS and regulatory compliance, is now firmly in that conversation. If your EHS function is not yet positioned to speak the language of risk and capital, that is a gap worth closing. The data tells a clearer story than most boardrooms have yet fully registered.
My Enhesa colleague Mary Foley has been writing about the investor-led shift in EHS and sustainability for Forbes and doing it with a depth and rigor that I find genuinely useful as a CFO. Her column is worth following.
→ Follow Mary Foley on LinkedIn and read her Forbes column.
Laurent Marcelis
Laurent Marcelis is Group Chief Financial Officer at Enhesa, bringing over 25 years of experience at the intersection of finance and technology. He leads the company’s global finance strategy, supporting international growth, M&A integration, and long-term value creation, with a track record of scaling high-growth tech businesses and leading major transactions including a €252 million IPO.
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