Climate-related disclosures

We accept climate change presents risks to our assets. We have produced a climate-related disclosures document to complement our latest Integrated Report. It includes:

  • Our Board’s role in overseeing climate-related risks and opportunities, and management’s role in assessing and managing those risks and opportunities.
  • How climate change is currently impacting us and how it may do so in the future. This includes our climate change scenario analysis, the climate-related risks and opportunities we have identified (including anticipated impacts and financial impacts) and how we will position ourselves as the global and domestic economy transitions towards a low-emissions, climate-resilient future.
  • How our climate-related risks are identified, assessed, and managed and how these processes are integrated into existing risk management processes.
  • How we measure and manage climate-related risks and opportunities.
  • A climate change scenario summary (Appendix one)

 

We are committed to providing climate-related disclosures for several reasons:

  • We are a debt issuer under the NZX and have a number of subsidiaries and carry out group reporting
  • We are a reporting organisation under the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019 (Zero Carbon Act)
  • We are a signatory to the New Zealand Climate Leaders Coalition and have committed to voluntarily measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions, setting a public emissions reduction target and working with our suppliers to reduce their emissions. You can read more about our latest emissions and what we’re doing to manage them here.  


 

Climate change scenarios

Climate change scenarios enable us to explore different possible evolutions of human societies and their implications for the climate (and vice versa). The purpose is not to predict the future – no probability is associated with the different scenarios – but to consider the uncertainty and support our decision making. The scenarios represent a series of potential climate outcomes and anticipated consequences flowing from these. This allows us to test the resilience of our strategy and our business model.

We use best-practice climate change scenario analysis to help identify our climate-related risks and opportunities, and to enable a better understanding of the resilience of our business model and strategy. We have developed three climate change scenarios utilising our Whakamana i Te Mauri Hiko work to assess transition risks, and the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) data linked to assess physical risks:

  • Transition risks are linked to the ability of Aotearoa New Zealand to decarbonise and electrify. The decarbonisation of our economy will rely on our ability to enable the growing electricity demand as the country moves away from fossil fuels.
  • Physical risks are directly dependent on the intensity of global warming. We have used data provided by the IPCC in their 5th and 6th assessment report as input for the climate component of our climate change scenarios, with the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP) they developed to incorporate the global socio-economic context.

 

Read Appendix 1 of our climate-related disclosure document for a summary of our three climate change scenarios. It includes global and local narratives, and data-based implications for each climate change scenario in terms of global and New Zealand climate, based on analysis and datasets from the National Institute of Weather and Atmospheric research (NIWA).