Sustainable Business
[ Last Updated 17 May 2007 ]
We will seek to help New Zealand firms, particularly those in key export sectors, to derive business benefits from sustainability practices, with a focus on improved environmental management.
To do this, we will:
- ensure New Zealand firms are able to use a range of effective environmental management tools to measure and promote their environmental integrity in world markets
- ensure that government, through its procurement requirements and decisions, encourages suppliers to incorporate sustainability into their goods and services
- support sustainable tourism in New Zealand, through leadership of the New Zealand Tourism Strategy 2015
- ensure that government's engagement with business on sustainability issues reflects business needs.
How New Zealand's goods and services are treated, as its trading partners respond to environmental issues, will be a key determinant of future business success. New Zealand has a favourable international positioning with a reputation for being clean and green, and a fair and honest place in which to do business. It must maintain this strong position, and has the potential to establish itself more firmly as a source of sustainability solutions for other countries.
Combining the advantages of New Zealand's natural resource endowment, capabilities, and institutions in ways that create a compelling value proposition also has potential to create new opportunities for New Zealand firms.
Exploitation of these opportunities will, however, require New Zealand firms to be more sustainable and to be able to demonstrate the integrity of their goods and services in markets that are becoming more demanding and discriminating.
This, in turn, will require high-quality research, information, measurement and reduction methodologies, and environmental management tools: in short, a high-quality eco-verification system.
New Zealand also faces international obligations to manage its greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the likelihood that the onus of responsibility on countries to reduce emissions will increase over time. Helping firms to develop more systematic approaches to environmental management will help New Zealand to achieve these emission reductions at least cost.
Leveraging government procurement to encourage behaviour change is also a powerful policy instrument that government will continue to employ.
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