2021 New Zealand Impact Report
At Deloitte, we have a responsibility to be a force for good and lead the way on the increasingly complex challenges society faces.
Through our client work and WorldImpact activities, we believe our people can have a tangible impact on society and the environment, and help to create a better future for all.
An integral pillar of our WorldImpact portfolio is WorldClimate, which puts focus on a set of initiatives that delivers climate action. WorldClimate is also our opportunity to use our eminence and professional networks to make our operations as sustainable as possible and support our clients and community to achieve the same.
This section provides an overview of Deloitte New Zealand's climate commitments. An important component of this is how we are empowering our people along with our clients to look for the linkages between these societal challenges and then helping to make lasting change.
Climate change is not a choice. It’s billions of them.
Mitigating the impacts of climate change is a monumental task. Yet, we know progress is possible if we act collectively.
To do our part to help the world achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, WorldClimate is our strategy to drive responsible climate choices within our organisation and beyond.
We recognise change starts from within. Globally, Deloitte has committed to achieving net-zero by 2030. Here in New Zealand, we are progressing towards this and believe we can reach a net-zero target by 2025.
We will achieve this by addressing our own internal policies and practices to make our office spaces and operations as sustainable as possible, including making material changes to how we interact with our clients and teams via travel.
We will also connect with others, empowering our professionals and engaging our broader ecosystems to create solutions that facilitate the transition to a low carbon economy.
The other way Deloitte makes material impacts is in our work with clients to support them on their own sustainability journeys. This is becoming an increasingly important topic at all levels of business.
The opportunity to create a more sustainable world is at our collective fingertips. We are all compelled to act.
Cut emissions / net-zero by 2025
New Zealand's geographic location on the planet means that travel to most places involves long distances and the use of aircraft. The nature of our business means that we have been high users of air travel. Those two things together mean that our biggest impact is our travel emissions. Whilst the pandemic has significantly reduced our footprint, we have been preparing for when the borders open again by developing policies and toolkits to support our reduction objectives, including rewriting our global, regional and local travel policies to demonstrate our commitment at all levels of the firm.
We have developed science-based targets (SBTs) to support our journey to net zero. These include:
- 50% per FTE reduction in travel emissions (including air, hotel, taxi, etc.)
- A move to 100% renewable electricity
- Supporting our suppliers to move to SBTs themselves; and,
- Offsetting the residual emissions.
In the last two years, we have offset our residual emissions via a Natural Capital Partners project that you can read about here.
Embedding sustainability
As well as rewriting our NZ travel policy, we have created two playbooks to support our people in making smarter climate choices for our internal activities and external client engagements.
Low Carbon Activations Playbook
This playbook supports our people to make more informed choices when designing client engagement deliveries by seeking to reduce carbon emissions throughout the entire delivery. It guides conversations with clients about how both parties can achieve a lower carbon output, with the same high-quality deliverables.
Sustainable Events Playbook
This playbook assists and inspires people to plan more sustainable events, whether in-house or using external venues. It provides suggestions to support event planners and can be used to further incorporate sustainability principles into gatherings and events, such as single use plastics, food and menus, location planning, etc.
Empower individuals
In support of the Deloitte Global #iAct campaign, we released a series of articles that engaged our people to identify individual actions they could take to address climate change across four topics – food, home, travel, and purchasing. Each topic had a list of positive climate actions that could be actioned today, next month, or over the coming year. Readers were encouraged to make small changes to collectively make big impacts.
“To help combat climate change, I have committed to becoming a conscious consumer when purchasing apparel. I’ve moved away from fast-fashion and instead try to buy pre-loved clothing or items made of natural, up-cycled and recycled fibres, which have less of an environmental impact.”
Laura Binnie, Manager, Clients and Marketing
Empowering our people – Festival for the Future
To further empower and inspire individuals, each year several of our people attend Festival for the Future. With world class entrepreneurs, business and government leaders to young professionals and people leading change in grassroots communities, the festival attracts a diverse audience and especially those driven to make a difference for our future across systemic challenges such as social justice, climate change and inequalities in health and education.
We asked our people who attended to share what insights and learning they took away from the festival and how we can use those insights to support the changes we need to make.
This is what one of our attendees said about the concept of empowerment.
"Māhaki is a term used to encompass both empowerment and enablement. So often we allow others to feel empowered, however the lack of enablement often holds people back. I want to ensure I allow those around me to feel both empowered and enabled.“
Zara McLellan, Consultant, Deloitte Private
Engage our ecosystems
At Deloitte New Zealand we have a significant number of relationships where we work together with others to address climate change at both a systems and operations level to create innovative climate solutions, remove roadblocks that get in the way of enacting change and increase demand for responsible products and services. We are proud members of:
Client story – recognising best practice in carbon reduction
With the support of Deloitte Australia, we conducted a peer review of the climate literature and models Christchurch International Airport Limited (CIAL) applied in their Aircraft Operations Noise Monitoring Report. This included future projections of wind, temperature, sea level pressure and extreme rain and the impact these would have on future runway use. The engagement helped further develop CIAL’s initial climate risk assessment which will prioritise future operational decision-making at the airport. These decisions inform the wider sustainability strategy, which is considered ‘best-in-class’ within the NZ business community.
Alice Oswald, Associate Director, Corporate Finance
Client story: revisiting sustainability in a post-COVID world
We were engaged by Tourism NZ to help deliver education and action-oriented support to various tourism businesses, of the small and medium size, regarding the enhancing of their sustainability management approach to help assist them in meeting their goals and the requirements of the market. We supported three different winter and outdoor sport related businesses.
The three companies had various sustainability related initiatives, with varied maturity, from carbon tracking and reporting to identifying conservation initiatives. We provided a report with clear recommendations on how they as a group can enhance their sustainability journey, considering six pillars of sustainability, and the impact they are making. We discussed the results and demonstrated the link between sustainability and reputation and brand as a market impact in this sector. The business in now taking in the recommendations and aiming to move forward on their programme, measuring and reporting.
Monika Wakeman, Director, Risk Advisory