Why should we care about sustainability? It is expensive, difficult and sometimes hard to understand. This week’s The Update looks at what we’re up against if we don’t.
The world of sustainability is a world of acronyms. SDG, ESG, CRE…we could go on. Frankly, when the cost of living crisis is hurting consumers and the cost of doing business is hurting primary producers, getting your head around how to “do sustainability” and then fund the necessary work can feel like a big ask.
Well, there’s a couple of things to say about sustainability when it comes to seafood.
Firstly, it would be wrong to suggest that somehow sustainability is a new or foreign concept to fishers. We have always understood the basics – that if you take more fish out than mother nature can put in, you won’t have a fishery. No fishery, no business. We understand the fundamentals of sustainability in a concrete, human way, grounded in personal experience.
Also, we see time and time again how our guys on the water talk about nature. They all have a nature related story and its usually one laced with pride about how they share the fishery with dolphins or how much they love the ocean itself. If we suddenly decided that somehow as an industry, we didn’t care about sustainability anymore, we would face an uproar from our own people.
But what about all those acronyms? What about sustainability on a business level?
One of the big presentations at the Seafood New Zealand Conference earlier this month was about SDGs – the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations and used by many New Zealand businesses as a standard to measure themselves against.
We heard at Conference from Bead & Proceed’s Bridget Williams that there are 17 of these goals. Several of them directly relate to what we do in seafood. All UN member states have adopted these SDGs – they are the largest globally recognised framework for sustainability and set 169 targets to be met by 2030.
At Conference, Bridget talked through what the goals mean and then asked everyone to effectively vote on which of the 17 was their personal highest priority (read Bridget’s report from the Seafood New Zealand Conference 2024). The top three for our audience were:
- SDG 14 – Life Below Water
- SDG 4 – Quality Education
- SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities
During the Conference, delegates told Bridget why they supported the goals they do, and several told her that being at sea connects them to their well-being. That should come as no surprise, given what we already know (and have said above) about our people and their views on the ocean. The SDGs may feel distant and theoretical to some, but we would argue they are instinctively understood by fishers.
But what about at a corporate level? Where do those other acronyms fit in? The ESG and CRE.
A CRE is a Climate Reporting Entity. It is now the law in New Zealand that around 200 of our large institutions have to make climate-related disclosures. No choice, no its no buts.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. These three factors are considered part of good reporting by businesses – to take account of the things that matter beyond the financial.
But, as another speaker at Conference told us, ESG is no longer a nice to have. Increasingly if you want to export your product, you need to be able to prove that you are meeting good standards around climate and the environment.
That speaker was Alana Lampitt, a Partner at law firm Chapman Tripp. She and several of her colleagues produced a report earlier this year for The Aotearoa Circle called Protecting New Zealand’s Competitive Advantagewhich showed that 80% of New Zealand’s exports by value are going to markets that have mandatory ESG reporting in force or proposed.
Even if you are not an exporter, you may be affected if you are in the supply chain for a New Zealand exporter. And even if you are exporting to countries that don’t have these standards in place or on the way, you may find that big customers, such as major European supermarkets, still want you to be able to prove that you are doing the right thing in terms of climate and environment. If you can’t, your market access may be at risk.
The world is changing rapidly. Expectations are ratcheting up. Our instincts and good feelings about the ocean won’t be enough anymore to convince customers and regulators. It’s not enough to just care about sustainability, increasingly the requirement is to prove it, despite the challenges we have in terms of funding that proof.
So, what are we up against if we ignore sustainability? Firstly, we are up against what our own people care about. Secondly, we are up against a changing world were almost all New Zealand corporates will have to understand and action sustainability plans and be able to show evidence of this. No matter how expensive, difficult and hard to understand the world of sustainability can be, we need to care about it and figure out how to demonstrate that we care, in order to keep fishing and to keep selling fish into the future.
