Taking a stand against climate change

At Kiwibank we’re committed to reducing our own carbon emissions by 30% and working with our customers to help them understand the risks and opportunities that climate change presents all of New Zealand.

Reducing our own carbon emissions

The emissions that we create from our own activity fall into the categories of power, travel, paper and waste.

We have committed to reduce our emissions by at least 30% from our 2018 financial year (July 2017-June 2018) by 2022 and we'll do this by achieving the following reductions:

  • 30% reduction in fleet emissions
  • 5% year on year reduction in travel, waste and paper
  • 60% reduction in electricity across all sites (offices, branches, business banking centres, contact centre).

Over the past year we’ve reduced our carbon in these four areas by a total of 17.5%. We’ve done this by:

  • Moving into a 5 Green star building in Wellington and are moving into a 6 Green Star buildling in Auckland
  • Reduced the total number of paper brochures that we offer by over 50%
  • Use carbon neutral paper for all of our office printing
  • Introduced mobility guidelines for our people.

How we're tracking

We measure our carbon emissions in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in line with Ministry for the Environment and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

We measure our carbon emissions in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in line with Ministry for the Environment and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

We measure our carbon emissions in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in line with Ministry for the Environment and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

Reducing waste

Whilst we don't make products, there are lots of different things that come with waste. That's why we've been working through our packaging and in branch supplies over the past 12 months to ensure that our packaging is recyclable and made from sustainable sources where possible.

  1. Deposit bags

    Changed our quick deposit bags from plastic to paper envelopes, taking around 80,000 single use plastic bags out of circulation.

  2. Envelopes

    Moved all of our envelopes to be fully paper based.

  3. Receipts

    We're changing our receipt thermal roll to BPA free products with the inner core made from recycled milk bottles.

Supporting our customers to manage the impact of climate change

Climate change is going to impact our personal and business customers in different ways, and we’re working to help them understand what that will be, and support them to be resilient to these impacts.

Our Sustainable Energy Loans are available for home loan customers who want to install solar panels on their home.

We know that climate change is going to impact the physical environment around us, through increased weather events like storms, drought, high winds and sea level rise. As a bank that is focused on supporting people into homes and helping small to medium sized businesses thrive, a key consideration for us is what impact coastal flooding will have for our customers.

We’ve committed to report in line with the Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures over the next 12 months. As a first step towards this we're working with NIWA to gain better information on coastal flooding and will use this information to have better conversations with our customers, and New Zealand on how we're all going to address this collective challenge.

We measure our emissions against our 2018 Financial Year, as that was the first year that Kiwibank was separated from NZ Post