Climate Accountants is a North Sydney-based firm doing specialist work to help organisations understand the financial implications of climate risk, navigate climate scenario analysis and prepare for mandatory sustainability reporting under frameworks like AASB S2. In short, they help businesses make sense of a rapidly changing regulatory and environmental landscape.

Growing up in northern India, I watched my grandparents and parents plant and care for trees. Coming from the Bishnoi community, where caring for nature is deeply woven into everyday life, I grew up understanding that we have a responsibility to look after the environment around us. That care for nature is part of who I am and how I see my place in the world.

Today, through Climate Accountants in Australia, I’m connecting those values with my work, helping businesses understand the financial implications of climate change.

With Fifteen Trees, we’ve supported the planting of 100 native trees and pledged five more for every engagement. As our business grows, we help something else grow too.

Vishal Bishnoi | Founder | Climate Accountants

Climate Accountants have made their own commitment clear. For every new client engagement, Climate Accountants funds the planting of five native trees. One hundred trees are already in the ground, and the number will keep growing as their practice does.

Site A | Wallis Creek, NSW | 100 trees | 2026

Wallis Creek winds quietly through mixed farming country in the Hunter Valley before joining the Hunter River. Along its banks, a handful of ancient remnant rainforest trees, rare on the Hunter Floodplain and last of their kind in this part of the landscape, still stand there. The Hunter Rainforest Revival Project team is working to make sure they are no longer standing alone.

Over three volunteer days, local community members joined staff from NGM Group’s Newcastle offices to plant along the creek’s riparian corridor (the fringe of native vegetation that lines our waterways).

The plants chosen to plant include species of – River Oak, Swamp Oak, Cabbage Gum, River Red Gum, Flooded Gum, Swamp Mahogany, Forest Red Gum, Flax-leaved Paperbark, Prickly-leaved Tea Tree, Native Frangipanni, Soft Corkwood and Willow-leaved Bottlebrush. Together these trees will form a critical link in the chain of Dry Rainforest habitat across the Lower Hunter.

As the plants mature and begin to flower and fruit, they will attract local native wildlife. Chief among the species the team hopes to attract is their project mascot – the magnificent Regent Bowerbird, one of Australia’s most visually striking birds and a sign that a forest is truly on the mend.

Climate Accountants notes that the trees are not treated as a quantified carbon offset – they’re a practical, stated commitment to supporting native revegetation and community planting projects. This kind of transparency is refreshing for a firm whose entire practice is built around rigour and accountability.

Writer: Colleen B. Filippa

With a background in Environmental Science (Melbourne Uni), Colleen is the Founding Director of Fifteen Trees. In 2009, after 20 years in secondary and tertiary education institutions, Colleen left the classroom to start the company. Fifteen Trees is a social enterprise assisting individuals and companies to reduce their carbon footprint by supporting community groups such as LandcareNSW.