Our sustainability
As the Ministry for the Environment, we know that we need to be walking the talk and leading by example when it comes to achieving the targets in our Sustainability Strategy.
As the Ministry for the Environment, we know that we need to be walking the talk and leading by example when it comes to achieving the targets in our Sustainability Strategy.
For us, sustainability as an organisation means operating within our baseline, minimising our environmental impact, and giving our people what they need to thrive.
We launched our latest Sustainability Strategy covering the period 2020-2022 at the beginning of the 20/21 financial year. The strategy contains many ambitious short-term targets and longer-term goals.
Since then the Government has announced a climate emergency and has launched the Carbon Neutral Government Programme.
The work we have planned and have already completed ensures that we are meeting all the commitments outlined as part of this programme. These commitments include setting gross emissions reduction targets in-line with a no more than 1.5 degrees of warming pathway (for us this means reducing our gross emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 from our 2017/18 baseline).
In 2020/21 we have achieved or made significant progress towards many of our targets.
This includes:
We have also made significant progress in other areas and meeting these goals fully will be our focus for 2021/22
This includes:
In our Sustainability Strategy, and to meet the requirements of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme, we have committed to measuring, reducing and reporting on our emissions profile, and having it externally verified. We are proud to have achieved the Toitū carbonreduce certification for the fourth consecutive year.
In 2020/21, we emitted 367.46 tCO2e, a 44 per cent reduction on the previous year (660.31 tCO2e), and 72 per cent lower than our 2017/18 base year (1324.12 tCO2e) – see Figure 1. The bulk of our emissions come from air travel and electricity for our three offices. COVID-19 has prompted us to place a much greater emphasis on online meetings, and we have improved our in-house technology and software to assist this shift.
Figure 2 shows how our emissions vary per month. The impact of COVID-19 lockdown is apparent from April onwards in our 2019/20 trendline.
No international flights were taken in 2020/21, as shown in Figure 3. This is due to the impacts of COVID-19, where we have suspended all international travel. We have instead met our international obligations by using technology to participate in meetings online.
We have a variety of measures to support reductions in our travel emissions by:
Despite growing our full-time equivalent (FTE) staff numbers over the past four years, our overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and emissions per FTE have decreased, as shown in Figure 4.
Specifically, our emissions per FTE (tCO2e) have decreased by 84.7 per cent on our 2017/18 baseline year, despite growing almost 300 FTE in four years.
As an organisation, we have made a conscious effort to cut our travel emissions on top of significant emissions reductions due to the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic has taught us a great deal about working effectively online. Over the past year we have continued to change our travel behaviour and to work with stakeholders in new ways.
Our annual emissions reporting period is from 01 July to 30 June of the following year. For auditing purposes, we require FTE numbers in the fourth quarter of each financial year. These figures may differ from the FTE numbers in the Organisational Health section of this report, which are based on FTE numbers as at 30 June.