The Carbon Neutral Public Service programme – our emissions inventory and reduction plan
What is the Carbon Neutral Public Service programme?
The Carbon Neutral Public Service programme aims to demonstrate government leadership on sustainability by reducing government’s environmental impact.
It will do this by making the 34 core public service agencies carbon neutral. It will make sure the six lead agencies are carbon neutral by 2012 with the other 28 agencies being on the path to carbon neutrality by 2012. The Ministry is one of the 28 stage two agencies.
How does the programme work?
The programme involves a three-step process.
- Measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from each agency’s activities.
- Reducing those emissions.
- Offsetting remaining emissions by undertaking projects to remove an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or prevent it from being released.
All 34 agencies will complete an annual emissions inventory, develop an emissions reduction plan for their organisation and implement the actions in their plans. The programme will use New Zealand-based projects to offset those greenhouse gas emissions that cannot be avoided after reduction activities have taken place.
Our emissions inventory and reduction plan
The Ministry of Social Development is one of the government agencies taking part in the Carbon Neutral Public Service programme.
You can find our emissions inventory and reduction plan for 2006/07 below.
- Download the Emissions Inventory – Word 278kb
- Download the Emissions Reduction PlanInventory – Word 56kb
Since the Ministry was established we have been committed to improving the sustainability of our activities, ensuring that we meet the needs of today, without adversely impacting on the needs of tomorrow. We have embedded a range of sustainable activities into our operations, for example:
- being the first agency to include emission details in a central agency tender for motor vehicles
- structuring the composition of our fleet around economical, low emission cars (92 per cent of the fleet are cars 1.8 litres or under)
- implementing energy saving measures with cost savings of more than $400,000 per year
- choosing Environmental Choice New Zealand products or equivalents, because of their greater energy efficiency or other environmental merits, in a range of products we use, including paints, carpets, paper, photocopiers/multifunction devices and cleaning products.
We are continuing to build and enhance our sustainability plans to support government priorities and ensure we operate as a sustainable workplace, governed by strong principles for social, environmental and economic sustainability. We are targeting a range of activities in the areas of energy, transport and waste that will reduce emissions in a practical and cost effective way. This includes the following:
- We are continuing to enhance our standard building and fit out specifications to ensure our buildings are as sustainable as possible. Last year we conducted a number of building energy audits and are developing lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning programmes to make our buildings more efficient.
- We have purchased and successfully piloted a new Desktop Management tool which can monitor energy use of networked IT equipment and remotely shut down unused equipment. We are also looking to consolidate some of our distributed office servers into our data centre environment. This will support enhanced management and flexibility of data and better energy efficiency. We have also recently replaced CRT PC monitors with flat screens as they are more energy efficient.
- We have a highly efficient fleet and have recently purchased 50 smaller low emission vehicles – 1.3 litre Hyundai Getz ‘smart diesels’. In 2008 we intend to replace around 150 cars with more ‘smart diesel’ cars. These are up to 30% more fuel efficient and reduce emissions by up to 30% over equivalent petrol cars. Following these replacements 27% of our fleet will have a CC rating of 1.5L or less. We are continuing to actively investigate opportunities to reduce standard specifications across the fleet to cars with smaller engines, and to streamline overall numbers where reduction would not affect the delivery of services to clients and stakeholders.
- We are introducing a video and desk top conferencing pilot in multiple Ministry regions to reduce travel and enhance service delivery.
- In 2006/07 we conducted 16 waste audits covering representative Ministry sites and around 2,700 MSD staff. From this we have established a robust profile of MSD waste to landfill. We have rolled out full recycling systems to our five National Office sites and are conducting and trialling full recycling in nine Northland region sites. We plan to progressively roll out recycling across all regions.
