I began my journey to a sustainable future envisaging a world of tree-hugging, lentil soup and freedom from reporting fuss. Little did I know that the bureaucrats had got in ahead of me and set up a rules-based order that made tax returns look like a walk to the dairy.
It turns out that the United Nations, Ministry for the Environment, MBIE and agencies like Toitū, the Green Building Council and NABERS, all have stringent requirements for the benchmarking, measurement, auditing and verification of greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and carbon footprint.
As I first looked at the reporting requirements it was quite off-putting. Would businesses really put up with this level of bureaucracy? How many private companies would be willing to divulge what could be very sensitive competitive information? Just where would businesses find the resources to report with the level of accuracy demanded?
Paperwork, compliance & more compliance…
And last month the compliance demands got even more stringent.
Any company listed on the NZ Stock Exchange and with a market capitalisation of over $60 million will be required to report on all its direct emissions with the regime commencing on 1st January next year, 2023.
To be specific, if your financial year ends on 31st March 2023, you will be expected to be able to verifiably report on a whole year’s carbon emissions, risks and remediation in full as of the year commencing 1st April 2023 to the 31st March 2024. If your year ends on the 30th of June, then you have a little more time to prepare, with reporting commencing on the 1st July, 2023. Annual shareholder reports just took on a whole new sustainability focus.
If your company is privately held or has a market cap of less than $60 million, this is no time to breathe easy. The new $60 million number is down from $500 million previously. Expect the government to widen its orbit once it has systems in place to demand more from the average medium scale business.
Before readers start crying, “Government overreach and political interference gone mad,” this new government mandate is only one of a series of sustainability challenges facing businesses.
It’s not just about the mandatory GHG and Carbon reporting for bodies like Toitū. It’s about shareholders and stock exchange reports, board reports, executive updates, feedback to staff and stakeholders.
Sustainability – the ‘Data Monster?’
It’s easy to think of sustainability as a data monster with no end to its demands on your businesses time and skills and with little benefit to show for it.
But then if you ask business influencers and stakeholders about their motivation for taking a sustainable position, it turns out there are many different reasons people choose a path to sustainability:
Government mandated reporting
Cost reduction
Saving money
Being more efficient
Supplier and customer demands
Recruitment and retention of the new generation of environmentally aware talent
Shareholder owners themselves who have defined a policy that reflects their own commitment to a sustainable future
These intended uses help form the policy and action statement that an organisation will formulate and highlight in communication with regulatory bodies and key stakeholders.
They also define the priorities which drive choices and resource allocation.
Finally, they define the type and depth of reporting that an organisation will commit to delivering in the years and possibly decades ahead.
As Peter Druker, founding father of modern business management so succinctly put it, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.”
Unfortunately, ‘screw the paperwork’ just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
A recent Microsoft report on New Zealand’s sustainability performance shows that more than three quarters of NZ businesses now have carbon reduction plans and policies. But that’s where the green wave crashes into a wall – and uncertainty about costs is a major factor.
According to Microsoft’s ‘Accelerating the Journey to Net Zero’ report, two related reasons stand out as to why businesses are failing to meet their targets. One is that businesses are unsure how to monitor their emissions, giving them no clear baseline or way to chart their progress. The other is cost. But as Total Utilities Sustainability Director, David Spratt, argues in a recent Microsoft article outlining the report findings, you have to consider the cost to your business of not transforming and the opportunity to increase market share if you do. While the report found that only 43 percent of NZ organisations have the financial resources needed to execute their carbon reduction policies – that’s assuming they’ve made accurate calculations. It’s hard to make a clear business case and create a roadmap for change without the right facts and figures. There are also significant disparities between sectors when it comes to making these estimates.
Decarbonisation – cost vs value
David points out that businesses need to look past simple upfront investments as many calculations relating to sustainable ‘costs’ ignore the significant efficiency gains that can be made. He referenced a manufacturing customer of Total Utilities who was looking to purchase a new transformer worth $1 million. Yet by placing IoT sensors in its factories to measure the actual demand on the system, Total Utilities demonstrated that significant efficiencies could be made that meant the transformer wasn’t needed. As David observed, implementing a well-researched sustainability plan can actually save on both utilities and capex costs. “We had another client, a construction firm, who put in bids for five major projects. Every single one of their clients wanted to know their sustainability credentials, and when they visited other builders’ websites, those credentials were on the home page. Sustainability, and communicating what actions you’ve taken to achieve this, have become essential to doing business in the sector.” He explains that businesses also have to consider their employer brand, in view of today’s skills shortages. People are looking for employers whose values align with theirs, and in many cases, who are actively demonstrating their progress on sustainability and decarbonisation. “When we talk about investing in sustainability, we’re not just talking about environmental sustainability but business sustainability – your ability to retain staff and customers, and their perception that your business is viable into the future,” says David.
Get with the programme
Another major reason that businesses predict they’ll fail to meet their decarbonisation targets is that they are unsure how to monitor their emissions, giving them no clear baseline or way to chart their progress. At Total Utilities, we have dramatically pivoted our business model over the past few years from supporting businesses to monitor and reduce their utility overheads from gas, water, electricity and cloud consumption – to using that data to measure your carbon footprint and support a sustainable transition. Our evolution reflects the fact that in recent years decarbonisation has moved from something just a few, ‘eco-conscious’ businesses or big emitters have focused on, to being embraced by the majority of NZ businesses. The government’s Climate Change Response Act enshrining the net zero carbon by 2050 target in law, as well as a raft of other legislation and consumer demand, have added further pressure to address climate change. The message to NZ business is clear – get with the programme or get left behind. There’s no doubt achieving net zero carbon will require significant investment and commitment right across the board. But turning New Zealand’s poor performance around relies on rapidly turning the tide on our mindset about cost vs value of decarbonisation.
Need help calculating and reducing your carbon footprint? We’re here to help! Contact us at Total Utilities.
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Part Three of Planet Spratt’s Journey to Sustainability
The tragedy of the commons is an economic problem in which every individual has an incentive to consume a resource, but at the expense of every other individual—with no way to exclude anyone from consuming. Initially it was formulated by asking what would happen if every shepherd, acting in their own self-interest, allowed their flock to graze on the common field. If everybody does act in their apparent own best interest, it results in harmful over-consumption (all the grass is eaten, to the detriment of everyone)
The problem can also result in under investment (since who is going to pay to plant new seed?), and ultimately total depletion of the resource. As the demand for the resource overwhelms the supply, every individual who consumes an additional unit directly harms others—and themselves too—who can no longer enjoy the benefits. Generally, the resource of interest is easily available to all individuals without barriers (i.e. the “commons”). *
*The Investopedia Team – March 2022
As a child I spent my hazy summers at a family bach overlooking a local farmer’s property. His property commanded sole access to a tidal beach and we could only go down to swim, sail and play with his permission. It was permission he gladly granted – it was the asking that was the important thing.
Over the years we got to know this “old man” and he would share information, “secrets” he called them, about the beach and its bounty. First there was the cockle bed well past the low tide mark but easily accessible for adventurous nine-year-olds prepared to get their bottoms wet. We would walk out at low tide, shuffle our feet around in the sand and then fill our little buckets with shellfish. We only took enough for dinner (cockle fritters with a touch of sand) and never wasted them for fear of a stern telling off by mum and dad or the farmer.
Later he showed us how to set a net for the snapper that schooled into the Bay at high tide during their early summer migration. The snapper fed on the cockles and kina, fattening up before moving up into the shallows to spawn among the mangroves in the upper harbour.
When we were a little older he showed us how to live bait off the rocks for the highly territorial kingfish who feasted on the Sprats, Mackerels and baby snapper that returned to our bay in late summer after spawning.
Then came the changes. The farmer died and no one survived him who was willing to run the farm or pay the rates. The local council stepped in to “protect the asset” and turned it into a park for use by all. We watched with interest as roads were built, footpaths laid, public toilets and bus stops installed. Then the people came. First in ones and twos. Then in their dozens. By the height of summer hundreds and sometimes thousands descended onto our once private slice of heaven.
With them came cockle hunters. We didn’t mind the kids and parents with their buckets and squeals of delight. It was the “sack people” who walked up and down the beach in human chains descending on the cockle beds when they discovered them and then filling huge sacks with their prize. They came every weekend taking and taking and taking until even our “secret” bed had been found and pillaged.
After a couple of seasons the cockle beds were almost totally destroyed. The sack people still came, but only very occasionally and for lean pickings. Every sack they took reduced the shellfish stocks even further. The families who took home a hard won bucket of cockles don’t really bother with cockling too much these days. An icecream from the dairy up the road is an easier prize.
The snapper don’t come round the headland much these days either, there isn’t sufficient left for them to eat. The kingfish still hunt mackerels and sprats around the rocks, but their numbers are tiny compared to before and none of them are the 75cm legal size even if you were lucky enough to catch one.
People still swim and laugh and play in the shallows. What they don’t know is that the sack people have denied them the pleasure and privilege of nature’s bounty. Their children will never understand the perfect complexity that once existed here and at many other beaches all up the Coast.
It’s called The Tragedy of the Commons and applies to so many of our supposedly limitless resources. The giant North Island kauri forests are gone, pillaged for export and local housing by the saw millers and gum diggers in the early days of settlement. Before them the Moas were extinguished by fire, weaponry and the fierce folk who wielded them both.
Now it is the streams, lakes and oceans that are being polluted, pillaged and poisoned by a few to their own benefit and to all of society’s great loss. It is an invisible plague that doesn’t even have the courtesy to call “bring out your dead” when passing by in their mega machines.
The Tragedy of the Commons problem that William Forster wrote about nearly two hundred years ago tells us a lot – mainly about ourselves.
One issue is the way we humans so often rationalise our behaviour with cliches like:
“I have my rights you can’t tell me what to do”
“If I don’t take it someone else will”
“There is plenty to go around I am only taking my fair share”
Another issue is that the application of quotas, catch limits, water rights and pollution controls require three main things:
Government Intervention
Willingness by both companies and individuals to pay for the cost of the resources that they consume
A means of measuring and controlling resource exploitation
The true cost of unfettered resource exploitation has occupied my mind recently. I made a trip to Nelson and saw the scallop seeding plant down near the harbour.
The scallop fisheries in Tasman and Golden Bays were fished to extinction back in the 1970’s and an attempt has been made to restore this lost treasure by breeding fledgling scallops in huge tanks and then collecting their “seeds” and distributing them across a range of sites that previously contained large quantities of these wonderful shellfish.
Nature’s resources destroyed forever
This decade-long attempt has been a failure. Dredging was the preferred (and cheapest) way of taking scallops commercially and privately fifty years ago. This method destroyed the sea grasses that covered the sandy bottom. These seemingly unimportant grasses were in fact the source of protection for growing scallops. The sandy bottom has been left a desolated desert and the scallops are gone, forever it seems, despite science’s best efforts to heal the damage done two generations ago.
What makes this, and so many other examples, so important is that there are still many people in New Zealand and around the world who treat our common resources as unlimited and consider the “most economically efficient” method of extraction as being the right way to do things. It’s not just businesses who act this way. Individuals like the sack people will destroy a resource seemingly without a second thought for the consequences.
Many of my generation have grandchildren now. Like me they have been to the beaches of our childhoods and found them depleted and barren – despite the pretty trees, the shiny concrete footpaths and solar powered public toilets.
We Baby Boomers too have seen that we have a role in changing the world around us. We are powerful and rich (so my children tell me) but we are not utterly immune to the pain of the loss of our natural treasures.
My colleagues and I are analysts by training and profession. Our response to sustainability is actively measuring our business’s carbon footprint now. Things like fuel, travel, lighting, heating and freight are all counted. We offset these emissions by paying for the carbon we consume either directly via renewable energy certificates (REC’s) or indirectly via government mandated carbon credits.
We are also doing this same analysis for many of our clients who are recognising that their customers want real answers to the problem of climate change and environmental destruction.
Our customers also see younger talent making employment choices on the basis of a firm’s social responsibility policies.
By measuring our usage, limiting our consumption and paying a fair price for our share of the planet’s prolific treasures there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
Perhaps one day my grandchildren’s grandchildren will see this time as a turning point in history as they fill their tiny buckets with just enough shellfish for a meal of cockle fritters with a touch of sand.
“If a thousand years were to pass in a second what would be left of us?”
The Dig – Movie
I read somewhere that the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is today. Autumn is coming and with the rains will come the opportunity to begin planting out the stream on my property that is so in need of a kind and considerate lover.
It is only five weeks but my efforts to bring my stream back to life have been an inspiration. Not in a, “Gee Dave, you are a great green guy,” kind of way, but with the people I have already met and talked to along the way.
Jim
Jim used to live on my land along with all the land around it. He wasn’t an easy conversationalist, preferring his own company unless it was down at the golf club over a few beers. He was, though, inspiring when we moved out from town eleven years ago.
Inspiring because he always helped but never interfered. Inspiring because he seemed capable of turning his hand to any task.
Most of all he was inspiring because he planted, one by one, the trees, bushes and shrubs that became the beautiful wetland and arboretum (a botanical garden dedicated to trees) that borders my place. My stream, when it’s not bone dry, flows into the wetland on Jim’s arboretum. From there it flows down and on to the Manukau Harbour.
Eels, conversely make their way back up from some mysterious place in the Pacific, into the Manukau and eventually find a safe place in amongst the wetland reeds. If I succeed in making it a safer place, they will continue their journey up my stream as they have done in the past.
Each morning I have my tea and toast on the front deck and look across and up at the established kahikateas and ancient totara that inspired him to protect by surrounding them with plantings from a nursery that was closing down and saplings from surrounding farms.
All I see is how many different colours of green there are. All I hear are the hundreds of birds he protected by sustained pest control programmes.
One time the neighbour clear felled a patch of trees on the land nearby. Possums, destroyers of forests and bush and predators to nesting birdlife, fled across to my place and into Jim’s arboretum. We silently went into competition, killing sixty of them in a two week period. Maybe the neighbour did us a favour – he never controlled pests on his land. Possums have never been a major problem since.
“We sure sorted them,” Jim said over a beer one evening.
‘WE’. Jim never said ‘we’. He was far too stoic to say that.
Jim left without really saying goodbye last year. He never liked a fuss. He sold the property and arboretum to Gary. Rumour has it that developers were eyeing up the land and that Jim rejected their offers despite pressure from the agent.
Gary
Gary had been looking for a spot to build a place for a while. He went over Karaka way and all he saw was bare blocks. “By the time I planted it out and the trees grew I’d be dead.”
He had a look at the arboretum and the land behind it that he could build on . He fell in love and made an offer which Jim rejected as ‘too low.’
“How much?”
“Ask the agent.”
“Too much,” said the agent who didn’t know the value of trees except as firewood.
“How much?” asked Gary.
The agent told him and Gary said yes. It was cheaper than the bare blocks in Karaka and he liked the view.
I spoke to Gary about the stream and my plans for it the other day. He lit up and offered me cuttings from the giant flaxes in the wetland.
“I’ll give you a hand planting them if you like. We can have a beer on the porch after and share the view.” ‘WE’. He said we. He never says ‘we’ except to his mates.
Ken
Ken is a horticulturist, gardener and all round ball of muscle and energy that makes this skinny old guy feel more than a little inadequate when he arrives with his chainsaw, weed wacker and hedge trimmer and smashes through work in a day that would take me a week if my back held out.
We have known each other for a while now and when I showed him my stream project I wasn’t sure if he would be as overawed by the enormity of the task as I am prone to be. He was engaged – no excited about the plan. I felt energised just being around him.
“We could clear five metres back from the stream to make it a bit easier to sort out the planting and fencing plan,” he offered after a bit of thought.
WE. He never says ‘we’ – he is too polite to say that.
A day later the stream bank was cleared, the old man’s beard cut back with the contempt this native forest smothering vine deserves and all the existing native shrubs were upright and free of weeds. Ken was on fire and so was I.
Samuel
Samuel minds my sheep for me. These days there are only six older ewes, all a bit fat from over feeding, beautiful and a bit posh. They are the product of a breeding programme that ended when I tired of lambs bleating all day and night because they were separated from their mum by a seven-strand fence and a wide-open gate.
Samuel treats them with a gentle hand. He even whispers to them– mimicking their low bleating and soothing them when he and his dogs work with them. I’ve never seen them cut, not even a nick, when he shears them. That is more than I can say for the ‘expert’ shearer I hired a decade ago whose heavy-handed brutality saw me shoo him off my property.
“Bloody townie,” he called back, not amused that I had held him responsible for the blood stains on my shell shocked animals. He didn’t hear my reply as he left – neither will you see it in print. I am far too polite for that.
Samuel is also a fencer in the off season. We walked the stream and I shared my hippy vision of plants, fish, frogs and eels. “We can fence off this spring,” he said. “The frogs and fish can breed in there away from the kingfishers. Set a couple of rat and stoat traps and it’ll be ideal.” ‘WE’. He never says ‘we’ – he’s far too shy and solitary for that
Please feel free to contact me, Planet Spratt, at [email protected] if you have any feedback, ideas or suggestions
Or you can make business and media enquiries to Total Utilities here.
“I am 75, I have Parkinson’s and I am at the wrong end of the telescope of life”
Billy Connolly
I may not be facing my mortality in the same dramatic way as our beloved Billy but last November I became an old age pensioner. My Super Gold Card arrived in the mail and last month I went to the movies for $11, the same price as for a child (were they trying to tell me something?)
I am young at heart but with a dicky heart. I am sound of mind, but with tinnitus ringing in my head. I’m sturdy, but in a podgy kind of way. In my mind I am thirty, except pretty girls don’t notice me anymore and if I notice them, it just seems a bit creepy. All this said, I can’t imagine a life full of free rides on the Waiheke Island ferry and cut-price day time movies.
Recently I worked out that if I follow my family genetic traits, I will live to be eighty-seven just like mum, dad and grandfather Frederick. That’s around 12,000 days left to somehow make a difference.
With that in mind I’ve decided to dedicate my remaining useful days to making the planet a better, cleaner, safer place for current and future generations.
I face this prospect with a combination of excitement, fear and trepidation. After all I am just an old school IT guy, a businessman, an erstwhile politician and a family man. Little of this qualifies me to lecture others on carbon footprints, soil, air and water quality and preserving what’s left of our flora and fauna.
Noting all this I am going to do it anyway. We are all on a journey on this precious, fragile planet and my small steps towards understanding, as unimportant as they may be, might just inspire someone younger and smarter than me.
In the meantime, I am inviting you along for the ride as I write this blog, record a Vlog or two and take a few photos. Feel free to reach out with suggestions. No one is ever too old to learn, least of all me.
My own backyard
In 2010 my beloved and I moved out of our treelined Central Auckland Suburb and onto a lifestyle block that we hoped would bring us a simpler, more authentic life that brought us closer to God.
The vision was a classic hippy dream in many ways. Growing organic vegetables, and meditations at dawn.
Twelve years later we are still on “the farm” as my kids call it but facing the daily realities of living on and with the land. Every year there is a new pest. I’ve admitted defeat and now spray California Thistle because I am too old and the thistle too tenacious for me to do otherwise.
Most disturbing for me is the stream that lies on our lower boundary. It is a testament to wilful ignorance, ineffectiveness, and greed. Wilful ignorance because I can’t see it from my house, so it’s pitiful state is easy to ignore. Ineffectiveness because I have fought a haphazard and ultimately losing battle with noxious water weeds, leprous water rats and stagnant algae. My attempts at native plantings have proved inadequate with hundreds of dollars’ worth of new seedlings dying under the strain of hot dry summers or washed away in flash floods.
Generations of dairy farmers have poured effluent into it. The runoff from nitrogen fertilisers has left any still water burdened with suffocating weeds and toxic algae. On top of dairy pollution there has been a reckless waste of water resources. Commercial vegetable growers have sucked more “free” water than the water table allows. The stream then runs dry in the summer leaving eels desiccating in the sun. There are no longer any more frogs or fish. These have been poisoned by agricultural chemicals and, lacking the protection of rushes, reeds and flaxes, pillaged by predators.
Yet there has been progress. When I talk to the previous owners and old timers around here, they tell me of a time when the stream was used as an open cesspit flowing directly into the Parurehure Inlet and onto the Manukau Harbour.
The polluted stream
It smelt so bad and was so fly blown that the local Franklin Council, despite being dominated by businessmen farmers, were forced to do something about it. Their action was reluctant and cursory but this, when combined with pressure on the dairy industry as a whole, has meant we no longer see the unrestrained ecological vandalism of the 1960’s and 70’s.
What to do?
I have rung the Council and asked for guidance. They were enthusiastic but, in the end, ineffective. Promises of calls back remain unfulfilled. COVID restrictions have led to the cancellations of the planned pest control and native planting seminars. I hope once things open up more that I will see a bit more help and advice from them. In the meantime, I find myself on my own.
Lesson one of “going back to the land and saving the planet” is that it is just plain hard work, a burden on the budget and frankly a bit lonely.
So, I am restarting. I am buying a post hole borer, to reduce the pressure on my back when digging planting holes in concrete hard soil and clay. I’ve been next door to the neighbour and taken a variety of flax cuttings from his wonderful arboretum. In early Autumn I’ll buy a bunch more new plants and trees from the Farrell Family Nursery. Planting trees and plants in better locations will hopefully lead to greater success and less wastage.
Pest control will remain a priority. This year has seen many of the native trees in our area “masting” with huge quantities of seeds and pollen encouraging birds to mate and reproduce at an exciting rate. We have around 50 breeds coming and going on our property and the sound of new life is exciting but sadly can be a false dawn.
Rats and mice are also attracted by the seeds, stoats in turn are attracted by the prolific rodent prey. Until the seeds run out and the rats, mice and stoats all turn their attention to the nests full of eggs and young chicks. The parents are helpless in the face of this invasion and often fall victim to the stoats who kill them for fun. To make matters worse local cat “lovers” have released their unwanted kittens into the wild, unfixed and unfed. This season I have counted seven black and white wild cats cruising around the open paddocks in a group. For now their attention is drawn to the plague of rabbits (this year’s pest) but soon that supply of food will run out and they too will turn their attention to the birds.
Lesson Two of “going back to the land and saving the planet” is that we compete for resources with cunning and relentless predators. Sometimes these are animals.
Please feel free to contact me, Planet Spratt, at [email protected] if you have any feedback, ideas or suggestions
Or you can make business and media enquiries to Total Utilities here.
