The worst scores given out went to Air New Zealand, Mitre 10 and Alliance Group.
The Climate Action Tracker Aotearoa (CATA), launched yesterday, rated 21 New Zealand companies with the aim of bringing international standards to carbon emissions reporting in New Zealand.
Companies that scored well welcomed the ratings yesterday; companies that performed poorly questioned them.
CATA project lead Prof Sara Walton, co-director of He Kaupapa Hononga the University of Otago Climate Research Network, said the scorecard at this stage provided a baseline to get the international standards going in New Zealand.
It also underscored the difficulty in comparing companies’ emissions reporting.
Pulling the information together in a comparable way proved difficult for the analysts involved, Prof Walton said.
Importantly, understanding the companies’ climate "impact" would be the next phase the project team expected to explore, she said.
"My key concern is that companies don’t play the game in order to get a high score — that we really start to drill down and start to understand impacts.
"This is just a start, a start to benchmark, but we want to see those reductions and those mitigations happening now and so we want to be tracking that."
Each of the 21 companies analysed were awarded a score out of 10 and some scoring highly might surprise some people, she said.
Some companies received low scores, but the score might reflect the organisation being "early on their journey" of emissions reporting, she said.
Alliance Group scored the lowest among the 21 companies rated, receiving 0.5 out of 10.
Alliance processing and safety general manager Wayne Shaw said the CATA score reflected "the limited information the report authors have about our operations" and not the efforts the company was making to reduce emissions.
The company had been internally tracking direct emissions for more than a decade.
And it would soon have a total of nine industrial heat pumps commissioned in Otago and Southland, which would mean a 23% reduction in the company’s coal use, he said.
Air New Zealand (1.5/10) said it was concerned about the accuracy of the scorecard and issued a detailed rebuttal of the CATA scorecard — on a point-by-point basis — using its "2024 Climate Statement".
(The CATA scorecard used reports from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023.)
Mitre 10 (1.5/10) questioned why it had been singled out in its sector and said it was not a "top emitter" as claimed.
It, too, said many of the areas in which the business had scored poorly had been addressed in the 15 months since the CATA analysis ended.
Fonterra and Meridian Energy both scored an 8 out of 10.
Fonterra sustainability director Charlotte Rutherford said the CATA seemed to provide a simple way to share information on a complex topic, "which we understand the challenges of".
"For Fonterra, it is encouraging to see the work that we’re doing reflected in the score. However we do note in our instance there is some work we’re doing that would further increase our score that isn’t acknowledged."
Meridian corporate affairs and sustainability general manager Claire Shaw said businesses would need to do "a lot of the heavy lifting" to deliver the emissions reductions required to temper climate change.
For Meridian, the majority of its emissions footprint was in the company’s supply chain, "so it’s a journey of continuous improvement, influence, and collaboration".
"Setting goals, taking action and reporting on progress is crucial, not only for the planet, but in maintaining the support of our customers, communities and those who invest in us for the long term", she said.
