Our sustainability
commitments and achievements

Toitū’s technical experts are hard at work preparing our FY25 climate and impact reporting. Our reporting period follows the financial year (July 2024 – June 2025).

Right now, we’re collating our climate reporting documents ahead of the regular audit taking place. As a proud signatory of the Climate Leaders Coalition, we aim to have our climate reporting completed in line with signatory requirements. Our full Impact Report is then collated and shared after our climate reporting is completed.

In the meantime, here’s a quick snapshot of our collective impact:

• 918 clients supported, with 779 on our Climate Impact and Enviromark programmes
• 1,005 certifications issued across Climate Impact, Enviromark, and non-programme
• 60.2 million tonnes CO₂e certified or verified during FY25
• 108,000 tonnes of high-quality offsets were cancelled by our clients

Our vision is for all organisations to have a net positive impact on the environment. Our purpose is to help organisations shift their impact on the climate and environment from negative to positive, at pace. Our mission is simple: build a better future.

At Toitū, we support New Zealand business leaders facing increasing pressure to move beyond compliance and shift their focus to proactive climate strategies that secure growth.

Climate action today is more than an ethical priority - it’s a business decision with tangible, strategic payoffs. As New Zealand’s leading provider of internationally accredited climate and environmental certifications, we’re helping businesses position themselves for success.

Our values

We hold the standard

We strive for excellence: we are experts in our field, dedicated to science and best practice. We hold New Zealand businesses to science-aligned goals and international best practices. We strive to expand our own and others’ mana, wisdom and knowledge.

We shape the future

We apply an intergenerational lens: we are standard bearers at the heart of the climate economy. We encourage sustainable practices that prioritise long-term stability in the economy, society and environment. We shape the future with simplicity, scale, accessibility and ease, making our expertise and influence available to all.

We are better together

We value connection and relationships: we honor the interconnectedness of all things, respecting the land, past, present, and future generations, and diverse cultures. By exploring the most effective ways of working together, we continuously innovate and achieve positive results nationally.

Celebrating our members’ achievements.

Our members are creating better businesses and a better environment with the help of our science-based, business-tested solutions. Some organisations have done exceptional work in decarbonising and revolutionising their internal processes to certify their product or organisation.

Yealands Wine Group

Yealands Wine Group are Toitū Carbon Reduce certified having been dedicated to advocacy and lowering carbon emissions across their supply chain with a focus on certification since inception.

Yealands has tackled the challenge of operating as a sustainable business chiefly through the use of innovations in their operations. From small wins such as babydoll sheep reducing the need for fuel-powered lawn mowers to big wins like installing the largest solar array in the country, Yealands has proven they are committed to reducing their impact on the environment.

Silver Fern Farms

Silver Fern Farms (SFF) is New Zealand’s largest red meat producer and exports to 60 countries. SFF has been Toitū Carbon Reduce certified for over 5 years now and has expanded its membership to include an environmental management system (EMS) for their 14 processing sites – which saw them earning the Enviromark Diamond certification with Toitū.

SFF launched Net Carbon Zero Angus Beef in New Zealand and the United States in 2021. This allows them to pay farmers directly for the carbon that their farms are sequestering, which encourages greater investment by farmers to plant and protect native wetlands. This is critical given the erasure of over 90% of the country’s wetlands, and with it much of the rare biodiversity restricted to these habitats. SFF are committed to stop using coal completely by 2030.

Ecotricity

Ecotricity was established to provide 100% renewable energy from hydro, solar and wind projects. They achieved Toitū Net Carbon Zero certification 10 years ago, and have recently elevated their climate action to become Toitū Climate Positive. Electricity is a major source of carbon emissions in New Zealand, which inspired Ecotricity to become the only provider of Toitū Climate Positive certified electricity. They now measure and offset all cradle-to-grave lifecycle emissions, including construction items for their renewable plants.

Ecotricity has increased their focus on advocacy and employee engagement, including providing electric vehicle (EV) buyers’ guides, and EV and electric bike subsidies for employees to invest in low carbon transport.

Ecostore

Ecostore exists for the health of their customers and the planet. They have been Toitū net carbonzero certified and Toitū enviromark diamond certified for over 13 years. They have reduced their emissions by changing from forklifts powered by LPG to investing in electric forklifts, and changing their internal processes to be as energy efficient as possible.
Ecostore is also leading the refill model in New Zealand, with refill stations at many supermarkets to reduce plastic waste. Toitū certification has helped them measure emissions and identify opportunities to innovate their processes and reduce emissions.

We hold ourselves to our own standard.

Our work holds Toitū programme members to account. Just measuring your impact isn’t enough – participating in our programmes requires committing to ongoing improvements, and then achieving them. We undertake multiple efforts to ensure we’re doing good ourselves. Two notable ongoing approaches are our JASANZ accreditation and B Corp certification.

JASANZ Accreditation

As an organisation, our own systems and processes for awarding certification are accredited independently by JASANZ (our regional accreditation body) in accordance with international standards for certifying bodies, including ISO 14065, ISO 14066, ISO 17029 and ISO 17065. JASANZ accreditation provides third party endorsement of our verification and certification services for greenhouse gas assertions. The Toitū net carbonzero and carbonreduce programmes were the world’s first to be accredited under ISO 14065, first accredited in 2009, and have maintained that accreditation under JASANZ ever since, including additional standards and requirements over the years. ISO 14065 specifies principles and requirements for bodies that undertake validation or verification of greenhouse gas (GHG) assertions. JASANZ is a member of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). The International Accreditation Forum (IAF) is a worldwide association of accreditation bodies and other bodies interested in conformity assessment in the fields of management systems, products, processes, services, personnel, validation and verification and other similar programmes of conformity assessment. Their primary function is to develop a single worldwide programme of conformity assessment which reduces risk for businesses and their customers by assuring them that accredited certificates and validation and verification statements may be relied upon.

Improving our B Corp score

Being a B Corp organisation is our own way of being accountable. As a certifying body, we can’t certify ourselves, so seeking independent endorsement shows our commitment to the standards we ask others to meet. We also measure our own carbon footprint every year and have the results independently verified, alongside our climate performance achievements and commitments; we seek to be equivalent to Toitū climate positive, but do not claim to be certified.

Being a B Corp supports our ambition for environmental regeneration and economic sustainability.

We have been a B Corp since 2019 and were recertified in 2022. The recertification process is done every three years to benchmark, improve and celebrate the impact of B Corps.
The work we have put in since the initial certification has really paid off – our score increased from 82 to 106.8 in our 2022 audit. The score increased across all five impact areas (governance, workers, community, environment and customers). We are always striving to improve our impact in these areas.

Where we've improved

Governance

• We have improved the diversity of our Board to include external perspectives and gender diversity. Our Board is small so we are limited in the diversity options we can introduce, but we welcome candidates from all backgrounds, and of all ethnicities, genders and sexual orientation, as we always have.

Workers

• Our lowest wage is still 20% above the living wage in Aotearoa.
• We conducted a pay equity analysis to identify gender and ethnicity pay gaps.
• We increased our diversity, equity and inclusion training offerings to our people.

Community

• We updated our company constitution to show that we consider all stakeholders when making decisions, commit to running our business for good, and consider impact on the environment and society over profit.
• We increased the number of employee volunteer hours (8 days in 2022 to 53 days in 2023).

Environment

• We continued to progress against our science-based targets for our greenhouse gas emissions.
• Our primary impact business model recognised by B Corp is through helping customers to improve their impacts on the environment and society through our work.
• A second impact business model, relating to the environmental education we provide, has been recognised.

Customers

• We recertified our impact business model, recognising the results members achieve in our programmes.

Expanding our carbon measurement

Better data is key to reducing emissions.

• The number of types of emissions we measure has increased.
• We now include emissions from purchased goods and services.
• Air travel emissions have increased compared with our 2022 report, but is still lower than our starting point in 2016.
• Emissions have dropped in all other areas compared with 2022.
• We are on track to meet our 2030 targets.

Toitū’s overall emissions footprint looked very different in the year to 30 June 2023 compared to the previous 12 months. In 2023, we captured and reported more data in line with the new Toitū Elevate standards.

For the first time, we captured data on purchased goods and services as well as more detail on employee commuting, and we included recycled waste and food waste alongside data on waste to landfill. Our measured emissions therefore look significantly higher, but these largely reflect our actual emissions more accurately. The one area where real emissions increased was air travel with a return to activity at levels closer to ‘business as usual’ compared with 2022.

Toitū’s total emissions for FY22/23 is 259.95 tCO2e.

The product footprint of our carbon certification services is 119.5tCO2e, which is the equivalent of 1.325kgCO2e per hour spent to provide these services.

Table: Emissions comparison for each financial year broken down by activity, 2016–2023.

Our significant sources

Purchased goods & services

Purchased goods & services was our most significant emissions source for the year, as we expanded the scope of what we quantify.
We estimated our purchased goods and services based on our expenses during the year. We included, among other things, office equipment, leased spaces, contractor’s activities, catering and beverages, and software licences.

We are updating our purchasing policy and surveying suppliers to ensure they align with our low carbon vision, and investigating where we can and can’t influence reductions, and which categories we should prioritise for better data. We can help most organisations we work with to make changes towards a low carbon future.

Air travel

Air travel was Toitū’s second-highest emissions source for the year. Following the end of COVID-19 restrictions and the return to normal for business activities across New Zealand, our travel emissions increased compared with 2022, as employees resumed visiting clients, travelling to other offices and attending conferences to maximise our positive impact.

Most of our client services are provided online to minimise the need for travel. However, our team occasionally needs to visit clients in other locations for project meetings and site visits during verification.

Other air travel was for team meeting days, conferences and training, and a small amount of international air travel to attend conferences overseas. Working together in person is a valued opportunity, especially for many who work remotely or have a team spread out around the motu (island).

These instances of air travel are carefully considered, and only undertaken where crucial relationship building or lessons shared is critical and will ultimately result in lowered emissions over the long term by improving our knowledge base.
We expect travel emissions to fluctuate in the next year or so as the business grows.

Employee commuting and working from home

We’ve trialled two new tools to help us gather more accurate data for emissions from employee commuting and working from home in FY23, and this emerged as Toitū’s third-highest emissions source. The improved data means that the emissions per employee looks higher, but the growth in overall emissions is largely due to a significant increase in employee numbers since our base year.

We offer highly flexible working arrangements to minimise the need for commuting and to support employee wellbeing. Reflecting a highly remote working culture, Toitū employees worked from home on average 168 days in 2023. Despite this, almost 10% of Toitū’s emissions come from employee commuting. Most of these emissions come from car-based travel to and from the Christchurch office, potentially reflecting the limited public transport infrastructure in the city. Still, the majority of Toitū employees walk, cycle or take public transport to get to work.

Emissions reduction targets

We are committed to managing and reducing our emissions in line with our Toitū climate positive programme requirements. We have validated near-term targets under the Science Based Targets initiative.

Our current targets are:

• absolute reduction of Scope 1 & 2 emissions by 74% by 2030
• absolute reduction of Scope 3 business travel (including employee commuting) by 57% by 2030.

Due to increasing the scope of our emissions measurement, we plan to update our Scope 3 targets and have these revalidated by the Science Based Targets initiative. As part of the process we will reassess our plans and targets to see how the business transformation will affect our emissions ‘curve’ – the point at which emissions will peak and start declining.

We have set long-term reduction targets of 90% for the first time. We believe we can do this for Scope 1 and 2 by 2040, and have set a target of 2050 for Scope 3. Our next step will be to work through the formal validation of these targets and the plans to achieve them.

Product footprint and our value chain emissions

Leading organisations are increasingly choosing to measure their product footprint which includes their upstream and downstream emissions, also referred to as value chain. In 2023, for the first time we calculated our product footprint for carbon certification. We wanted to provide transparency to clients and the wider public on the result of our services and the climate action being undertaken to reduce it.

The product footprint of our carbon certification services is 119.5 tCO2e, which is 1.325 kgCO2e per hour spent to provide these services.

This exercise still had substantial uncertainty, but it has highlighted the largest areas of emissions where we need to focus for future reductions: travel and energy use for computers and servers. In future, we will collect more precise data and develop this footprint further. It will also inform our business transformation so we can consider the emissions impact of decisions about our software, equipment and tools. The method used to calculate the product footprint includes the life cycle approach, so it does not represent an exact subset of our overall organisational emissions.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

As the owner and operator of the Toitū Net Carbon Zero certification programme, we do not claim to be Toitū Net Carbon Zero certified. However, we meet all the same requirements as our certified clients. Our emissions inventory is audited annually and we purchase offsets to achieve a neutral emissions balance. We are also working to reduce emissions in line with climate science to achieve net zero emissions. For details of our inventory, reduction efforts and offsets please see the following disclosure statements. Historical disclosures prior to our 2016-17 base year are available upon request. Our third-party verification reports and emissions inventory reports are also available on request.

• Annual statement 2023 to 2024
• Annual statement 2022 to 2023
• Annual statement 2021 to 2022
• Annual statement 2020 to 2021
• Annual statement 2019 to 2020
• Annual statement 2018 to 2019
• Annual statement 2017 to 2018
• Annual statement 2016 to 2017

Overview

What are climate-related risks and opportunities?

Climate change affects all of us, and the impacts will only intensify as global heating continues. Climate-related risks are those that arise from the impacts of a warming climate, as well as those related to the human responses to climate change and our transition responses. Risk assessments aim to understand the nature and level of climate change related risks, as well as opportunities. The assessment process will guide your organisation in how to reduce and respond to these risks, but if done thoughtfully can also highlight opportunities to build resilient operations, new revenue streams, and robust strategies for decades to come.

Understanding climate risk and opportunities enables an organisation to prepare mitigation strategies and identify business opportunities. The process to assess potential scenarios, determine the risks and opportunities ahead, and plan how to manage them will ensure an organisation is much more resilient in years to come. The assessments support risk prioritisation, which can then drive targeted action and investment in adaptation.

Understanding your climate risks and opportunities demonstrates company foresight and resilience to stakeholders and builds your organisation’s brand as a climate leader.

Climate scenarios

Climate change scenarios are a way of describing possible future changes to climate variables and hazards. There are a range of future climate scenarios based on the level of global heating that occurs. The scenarios help guide thinking on the severity and likelihood of impacts on operations, facilities, value chains and communities.

Toitū’s scenario-based approach for this process uses guidance developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); we focused on three key scenarios: orderly, disorderly and hot-house world.

Orderly:
This is our best-case scenario based on a very stringent pathway and likely limits climate heating to around 1.5C. In this scenario, carbon dioxide emissions decline from 2020, reaching zero by 2100, with methane reducing in half; this scenario also requires negative emissions through removals, such as forest-based sequestration.

Disorderly:
This is considered an intermediate scenario, with projected temperature rise of 2 or 2.5C. While it is the most probable scenario, it does depend on very sharp and stringent decarbonisation enacted in the 2030s. In this scenario, carbon dioxide emissions decline from 2045, reaching half (compared to 2050) by 2100, with methane reducing by about 25% compared to projected 2040 levels; this scenario also requires negative emissions through removals, such as forest-based sequestration.

Hot House World:
This is taken as our worst-case scenario, resulting in climate heating of 3 or 4C. This scenario would see minimal change to current behaviour and practices, and thus emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century.

We will be sharing more on our work in this space soon.

Enhancing employee wellbeing

If our employees are thriving, then our business will also thrive.

Our goal is to create a workplace that fosters a sense of wellbeing for our employees, and an environment that upholds a sense of mana and personal integrity. We want employees to feel supported and trusted, and to have a sense of fulfilment and purpose. The benefits of this will carry through to our wider relationships with clients, and enable us to do the best we can to help organisations have a net positive impact on the environment.

Our wellbeing pillars:

• Our purpose – Toitū – Be actively sustaining
• Breathe out – Hāputa – Be in action
• Breathe in – Hāunu – Be in relationship
• Held breath – Hāpupuri – Be in balance

Our wellbeing journey

We have rolled out several initiatives and held events that support our vision for a happy, healthy and thriving workforce. These initiatives support each of our four pillars of wellbeing.

Toitū – Our purpose – Actively sustain

We created a guide that outlines our unique, Toitū-specific approach to wellbeing. We provided an introductory session to share the guide and explain the processes for addressing any wellbeing issues that may arise in the workplace.

Breathe out – Hāputa – Be in action

As part of our pillar ‘Hāputa – Be in action’, we gave a wellbeing koha to each employee, we are redesigning our onboarding processes to make the transition to working at Toitū smoother.

Breathe in – Hāunu – Be in relationship

For this pillar, we held team building events such as scavenger hunts. We also focused on cultural celebrations with Matariki workshops – which were rated highly in employee feedback. We started monthly group walks for Toitū employees, as well as Coffee Kōrero, where two employees from different parts of the business are matched to connect and learn from one another.

Held Breath – Hāpupuri – Be in balance

We moved to a new Employee Assistance Provider, Clearhead, which offers online and in-person services. They also hold monthly wellness webinars and provide an app for mental health support, resources and self-assessment linked to preferred learning styles for all employees and contractors. We also ran emotional culture workshops, offered a 12-week mindfulness programme series, and celebrated several ‘weeks’, such as Mental Health Awareness Week, to bring awareness to issues surrounding mental health and wellbeing.

In addition, we provide 22 days of annual leave, plus three additional ‘Toitū’ days to be taken between the Christmas and New Year period, per year for all employees, and the office closed for three weeks over the summer holidays to support active wellbeing at the end of the busy year.