Our sustainability

• See our Sustainability strategy for 2020-2022 [PDF, 1.4 MB] 

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).

Progress towards our targets

In 2020/21 we have achieved or made significant progress towards many of our targets.

This includes:

• A staff volunteering pilot, where eight teams from around the Ministry participated in volunteering projects such as weeding to protect native seedlings, and distributing food, toys and clothing to families in need in the Wellington region
• Our Te Ao Hurihuri (Māori-Crown capability and capacity building) strategy was designed and implemented
• Normalised our way of working to be flexible by default by enabling and empowering our staff to work remotely
• Recertification of the Rainbow Tick
• Reduced turnover from 25.8% in June 2019 to 8.7% in June 2021
• Launched Tui Raumata, our Diversity and Inclusion Policy
• Provided annual staff events that celebrate our diversity, such as: Rainbow Tick celebration, Women in Science, Lunar New Year, Christchurch and Auckland Pride events, Women’s Day, NZ Sign Language Week, Autism Awareness Day, Ramadan, Pink Shirt Day, Eid-al-fitr, and Global Accessibility Day
• Implemented our Gender Pay Gap Action plan
• Measured and externally certified our carbon footprint [Toitū website]
• Reduced our emissions by more than 26% from our 2017/18 baseline (see Figure 1 below)
• Reduced our waste to landfill from our head office by more than 50% from our 2017/18 baseline (54% reduction in 2020/21)
• Reduced our paper use by more than 50% from our 2017/18 baseline (69% reduction in 2020/21)
• Measured and reported on our financial and non-financial results via our annual report.

Progress in other areas

We have also made significant progress in other areas and meeting these goals fully will be our focus for 2021/22

This includes:

• Ensuring our new head office building (which we move into in mid-2022) achieves at least a five star Greenstar Building rating
• Continuing to use our environmental reporting programme to inform greater action on sustainably managing our natural assets
• Fully operationalising our refreshed engagement and partnerships strategies so we achieve measurable environmental benefits
• Ensuring staff feel engaged and empowered to use alternatives to travel
• Embedding procurement practices that are both sustainable and inclusive
• Developing and implementing a capability framework that identifies opportunities for the everyday development of our people
• Regularly measuring staff wellbeing and take action to improve it
• Ensuring sustainability is at the forefront of our minds and is woven into our everyday policy actions, advice and outcomes
• Co–ordinating and managing our funds for the greatest environmental impact/benefit and in line with our priorities
• Ensuring sustainability criteria are reviewed and updated in the funds we administer. 

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:

• guiding staff on sustainable travel options and behaviours
• setting internal emissions budgets, alongside financial budgets, for our policy groups
• rolling out better video conference technology to work remotely far more effectively, and to meet with stakeholders around the country
• providing a low-emissions fleet of an e-bike, bikes, and scooters for staff to attend meetings around the city.

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.

We are on a journey to be at the leading edge of understanding and addressing our climate-related risk

Climate change presents a challenge of unprecedented scope and complexity. As a government agency operating at the forefront of climate-related policy development, we are committed to understanding and addressing the actual and potential effects of climate change on our own operations, strategy, and financial plans. As one of the agencies leading the development of New Zealand’s new climate-related reporting regime, we have high ambitions around assessing, managing, and disclosing our own climate-related risks and opportunities.

We have been publicly reporting our greenhouse gas emissions since 2017, but this disclosure is our first to align with the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), commonly referred to as best-practice guidance.  The TCFD framework is based around four domains: Governance; Strategy; Risk Management; and Metrics and Targets.

We recognise that being at the leading edge, means being committed to self-reflection, transparency, and ongoing improvement. An independent assessment of our climate-related policies and processes in 2021 identified opportunities for improvement across all four TCFD domains, while noting that our Metrics and Targets efforts already demonstrate an advanced level of maturity relative to leading practice.

We are using our climate-related disclosures to share our actions and performance as we progress on our journey to address our climate-related risk, build organisational resilience, and achieve carbon neutrality.

The Ministry is leading the development of New Zealand’s new climate-related reporting regime and while not mandatory for the Ministry we have adopted this reporting to enable assessing, managing, and disclosing our own climate-related risks and opportunities.

This disclosure is based on the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure.

We are committed to ongoing improvement

To date, our efforts have focused on:

• using scenario analysis to identify and interrogate our climate-related risks and opportunities
• committing to carbon neutrality by 2025 as part of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme and setting targets to reduce our emissions by 26 per cent by June 2022 and halve our absolute emissions by 2030 from 2017/18 levels
• publicly disclosing our emissions reduction performance each year and developing an action plan to reduce our carbon emissions under the Toitū Envirocare carbonreduce programme
• joining the Climate Leaders Coalition and Sustainable Business Council to signpost our intentions and be part of a network of organisations who are committed to improving performance
• read our full Climate-related disclosure 2020/21

As part of our commitment to ongoing improvement, our plans for the 2021/22 financial year include:

• setting up governance arrangements for managing climate-related risk
• setting up risk management processes and accountabilities for climate-related risk
• conducting regular scenario planning to identify and assess our climate-related risk
• reviewing stakeholders and partner plans to ensure we are supporting them well with climate change knowledge and tools
• ensuring climate risk is consistently and systematically considered in our investments and policy work.