Helping small business take action on climate change.

Challenge.

Smaller businesses wanting to reduce their impact on the environment and play their role to reduce carbon emissions are often challenged by inconsistent information, little in the way that’s relevant to their context and knowledge gaps that make it hard to make progress.

Research highlighted these challenges and identified opportunities to address these market shortfalls with an easy-to-use and free tool that tailors actions to the business context.

Solution.

The toolbox is a web-based tool that is hosted on business.govt.nz – and designed to be regularly enhanced as capability develops.

The toolbox focussed on providing ways to help businesses reduce emissions and include information and links about measuring your carbon footprint. Carbon tools are typically designed to measure emissions and usually provide ways to offset them. Measuring is a valuable step but is only one part of what many businesses could do.

The toolbox includes actions for reducing emissions over five key areas – transporting people, transporting goods, office operations, site operations and equipment, and the design and making of products.

For every climate action, there is a step-by-step guide with links to more details and inspirational stories from Kiwi businesses already taking climate action so we could share their stories to inspire others.

Future updates of the toolbox will provide more sector-specific information and actions.

Outcome.

The toolbox has seen a large number of businesses sign up since its launch. The goal is to have at least 10,000 organisations complete the assessment and take actions in the first year.