August Circle Update

Green Shipping Announcement

The Aotearoa Circle is announcing a new workstream – Future Fit Shipping.  This work is still in the early stages and was announced in the joint 2+2 statement from the Ministers of Climate and Finance from Australia and New Zealand last week.  That meeting discussed joint action to meet climate commitments on both sides of the Tasman.

 A bilateral action is “convening roundtables with the maritime sector to identify the conditions required for green shipping routes between countries.” The Circle’s Future Fit Shipping workstream will be part of this. 

 New Zealand is heavily depending on shipping for trade.  By “greening” shipping, our exporters will be able to reduce their scope three emissions.  Not only will this reduce their overall climate impact, it will also make us more competitive as a trading nation, in a world where better environmental performance is being demanded by our trading partners and customers.

Look for further updates on Future Fit Shipping in the coming weeks.

Our Survey Results

We owe our Partners a vote of thanks for the high participation rates in our recent Partner Survey and for excellent quality of the feedback we got.

We also want to express our appreciation to Steve Maskell of DNA Design who did the work for us on the qualitative aspects of the survey and helped us with survey design across the entire project. Steve also did detailed interviews with a number of our Partner representatives to really dig into their views. 

Straight off the back of collating the results, The Circle has started a process of strategy refresh. We are five years old, so this is a good time to ask ourselves some hard questions about what we do for the next five years. The Circle is unusual in that we have set ourselves a best before date of 2035. By then, we want to have achieved our mission and be able to say that we helped restore nature for future generations in Aotearoa.

We will keep you updated and will have more to share on strategy after our board, the Guardians, meet in mid-August.

ESG Reporting in the Media: Coverage of Protecting New Zealand’s Competitive Advantage

The Circle’s report on the rapidly changing expectations for ESG reporting has received a lot of attention. Most recently, Protecting New Zealand’s Competitive Advantage was featured in a New Zealand Herald Agribusiness and Trade supplement (as premium content here). 

Chapman Tripp Partner Nicola Swan and the Director of Climate Sustainability and ESG Kate Wilson Butler wrote that our exporters are now having to adapt to a new international trading environment, in which sustainability performance and reporting is increasingly the cost of doing business. 

You can find the full report on our website here.

The Chapman Tripp team, represented by partner Alana Lampitt, will also be sharing the details of the report at the Seafood New Zealand Conference in Auckland in early August.  And recently, NZTE hosted a busy and popular webinar about the report and followed up with a comprehensive article explaining its implications.

Time to Listen to Our Young People

We’d like you to meet our RAP. Many of you will be aware of our Rangatahi Advisory Panel – every month in our newsletter we publish an interview with one of them (the RAP Perspective). You may also know that they are our shadow board of professionals under 30, who help guide our work at The Circle.

Now we want to invite you to meet them.  We are hosting an online webinar to introduce them to our Partners and beyond, and to help the wider Circle community understand why we have a RAP and how this model could benefit your business.

To register for this webinar, please click here. This is not just limited to Circle Partners, so please feel free to distribute this to other business contacts you think might be interested. 

Having a RAP has made a huge difference to the work of The Circle.  As an example (you may have heard us talk about before) our biotechnology work would not exist without them.  It was the RAP who asked in 2023 why we weren’t exploring the potential for the use of modern genetic technologies to address aspects of the climate and nature crises.  As Hinera Parker says in this month’s newsletter, young people are incredible.