Introduction 

With the New Zealand Climate Standards now active, many of the country’s largest and listed companies and financial institutions are now legally required to disclose their climate change response strategies and climate-related risks to their business and financial performance. 

Although the NZCS is mandatory for Climate Reporting Entities1, many other companies and organisations such as co-operatives are taking notice of the standards.  

Some are going further and are preparing climate-related disclosures or greenhouse gas inventory statements with an eye to a future when a legislative amendment may bring them under the NZCS framework. 

Until 2024, many of our largest listed companies had been disclosing their climate risk under the global and voluntary Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosure, the blueprint for the NZCS. For them, moving to the NZCS was not a large step. However, many still required technical and drafting support for their first NZCS report. 

For others, reporting climate-related risks and strategies is relatively new. A number of these organisations have approached Wright Communications over the past year for support in developing their first Climate-related Disclosure Statement. 

Our approach 

As a communications agency with a strong focus on sustainability storytelling, our approach with Climate-related disclosures is similar to how we view sustainability reports and annual reports: it is all about the narrative and messaging. 

Compliance with the Climate Standards is, of course, important. But writing a climate-related disclosure should be more than a box-ticking exercise. 

It is an opportunity to clearly and succinctly communicate an organisation’s approach to climate change, its strategies for mitigating the impact of climate change and for reducing emissions from its business activities and managing the risks it faces. 

More than ever, it is important for organisations to be clear about their roadmaps for meeting climate targets. Increasingly, legislators and customers – wholesale and retail – want to know how a company is planning to meet its targets. Ambitious statements and intentions need to be backed up by a clear plan. 

Specifically, companies that export to the European Union will need to comply from September 2026 with new rules which will prohibit climate neutral claims without clear, objective, public and verifiable commitments set out in a detailed implementation plan. The new rules are part of an EU move to empower consumers for a green transition and to ensure they have better and more harmonised information about the products they buy. 

The Outcome 

When it comes to Climate-related Disclosures, our expertise is in crafting the key messages, drafting content and editing client-drafted content. We have carried out this work for a range of corporate and co-op clients in the past year. 

In some cases, we have been asked to review content that has been drafted by several departments such as Risk Management, Sustainability, Environmental Management and Commercial Trading. In these tasks we edit or rewrite to improve consistency, meet compliance requirements and, in several cases, remove repetition and considerably reduce length.