Sustainability News Special

Sustainability News Special snapshot:

Click on the links below to read more:

B Corp Changes – The B Corp certification is undergoing its biggest overhaul in 20 years, shifting from a scoring model to strict minimum requirements across seven impact areas. This will significantly affect how businesses achieve or maintain certification.

Passing the 1.5°C Threshold – New climate science shows the world is set to surpass the critical 1.5°C warming threshold — meaning businesses must now plan for a hotter, more volatile climate by urgently cutting emissions and assessing exposure to physical and financial climate risks.

Net Zero Tracker Updates – The latest Net Zero Tracker report shows encouraging global progress, with 63% of the Forbes Global 2000 and 19 of the G20 nations now setting net zero targets. However, the credibility and execution of many commitments remain a major concern.

Planetary Boundaries – The latest update from the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab confirms that humanity has now breached another critical Earth system limit — ocean acidification — putting marine ecosystems and ocean-dependent industries under increasing threat.

AI – As AI continues to transform industries, businesses must balance its productivity benefits with ethical, environmental, and social considerations — ensuring responsible use, data security, and a focus on using efficiency gains to support people, not replace them.

An Update on The Right to Repair – The New Zealand Government’s decision to reject the Right to Repair Amendment Bill is a major setback for circular progress, leaving businesses that want to offer repair services to pursue these initiatives independently.

EU Adopts Extended Producer Responsibility for Textiles – The EU has adopted landmark Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) rules for textiles, making producers financially responsible for the collection, sorting, and recycling of textile waste — a major step toward accountability and circularity in the fashion industry.

EU Adopts Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) – The EU’s new Directive will ban vague or unverified environmental marketing claims and require robust evidence and recognised certifications, setting stricter rules for how sustainability can be marketed from 2026.

B Corp Changes

The B Corp certification standards are undergoing their most significant change since the movement began around 20 years ago, and businesses will need to prepare for a very different framework should the wish to achieve or maintain the certification.

For a detailed overview of the framework and the impending changes see this video and accompanying written blog we have shared previously.

While we are supportive of BCorp updating the standards, how these new standards are received by businesses and the BCorp community are yet to be known. We do expect there to be many who find the new standards to challenging and others who may think they are not challenging enough. Time will tell.

They key difference is that B Corp will no longer be a scoring system but instead have minimum requirements across seven impact areas that must be achieved. No longer can businesses have a poor score in one area but make up for it by scoring points in others.

A major factor that might influence business to go ahead with the new standards is the acceptance of the BCorp certification by the new European Union legislation, Empowering Consumer for the Green Transition (ECGT, aka EmpCo, aka Empowering Consumers Directive) relating to reducing greenwashing. These standards rule out business creating their own standards or certifications. “Any sustainability certifications have to “have been established by a government agency or are based on a certification system within the meaning of the EmpCo requirements, i.e. they meet strict transparency, objectivity and independence requirements. ” And B Corp Global have been working with EU to make sure their new standards meet the ECGT certification requirement.

To help those interested in achieving the B Corp certification or ensuring the maintain it as the standards change below is a checklist that highlights where the new B Corp standards are likely to have the biggest impact, and what companies should be considering as they prepare.

Read what BCorp says about the new standards here. Explore the new B Lab Standards

Note, businesses can still apply for B Corp certification under the current standards until “the end of 2025”.

Reach out if you have any questions.

Passing the 1.5°C Threshold

Following in line with the latest climate science we at Go Well are now advising our clients’ that, regretfully, they should plan for the global average temperature to surpass the critical threshold of 1.5°C.

Since our genesis in 2017 Go Well have always advised businesses to aim for warming of no more than 1.5°C in line with the globally recognised climate science, especially that of the IPCC, and the Paris Agreement that was signed by 195 countries in 2016 which reads: “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”

In the nine years since the singing of the Paris Agreement increasingly up to date and advanced science showed that 1.5°C was the threshold required to avoid irreversible climate change.

However, recent climate science is now clearly showing that the 1.5°C threshold will be breached.

Why is 1.5°C of global warming the goal?

1.5°C is the point at which irreversible changes will occur. Or in other words we will experience run away climate change that will take thousands of years to stabilise again. The major cause of this is feedback loops (technically in this instance confusingly referred to as “positive feedback loops”).

One common example of a positive feedback loop for climate change is the increased melting of snow and ice. Due to the Albedo Effect the parts of the Earth’s surface that are coloured white reflect the sun’s light, and therefore heat and energy, back into space. However, as the planet warms up more ice and snow is melting exposing more dark earth and ocean, and those surfaces are instead absorbing the suns light/energy/heat, and the planet is warming up further melting more snow and ice.

For more on the causes of climate change and what businesses can do to help reduce it, see our About the Climate Emergency web page.

What is the new science telling us?

It’s no longer a question of whether we go over the 1.5 °C threshold, but how long we spend above that level of warming, and how hot we get. The longer we spend above 1.5 °C, and the hotter we get the greater the climatic changes we will experience, the more uninhabitable Earth will become, and the longer it will take to cool back down.

So, what should businesses do?

As always, the answer to this question is very contextual to the type of business, its size, location, current impact, and available resource. Our advice is always to take every step possible to reduce emission as much and as quickly as possible, and to champion and support the rapid transition to a decarbonised and circular economy. However, business should now be thinking more about what a world of greater than 1.5 °C means for them and how exposed is the business to extreme weather events. Do you have critical infrastructure that is highly exposed to extreme weather or likely to become uninsurable? Is your supply chain exposed to extreme weather events? Is your distribution to market exposed and could insurance premiums become untenable?

There are plenty of resources available such as the Probable Futures Climate Maps, the New Zealand MfE Climate Projections Map, or the Climate Risk Map of Australia if you want to do your own research. Or contact subject matter experts to help you.

Net Zero Tracker Updates

While it is incredibly sobering to be openly admitting we will go over 1.5 °C of warming there is some good news. The latest Net Zero Tracker Stocktake on the status and trends of net zero target setting across countries, subnational governments and companies is showing progress.

Despite the global political headwinds such as the USA pulling out of the Paris Agreement again, more and more countries have net zero targets including nineteen of the G20. Meanwhile 63% of the Forbes Global 2000 have net zero targets, covering $36.6 trillion in revenue (70% of total). In the U.S., company commitments grew by 9% in the past year. Although the integrity of the targets and the plans to achieve them remains an signficant issue.

You can read more about their latest findings here.

Planetary Boundaries

Having worked with us you should be familiar, or at the very least away, of the Planetary Boundaries. A groundbreaking scientific framework that shows the nine critical Earth system boundaries and how we are pushing them beyond breaking point.

We, we are sorry for more bad news but Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) as just announced we have passed another boundary. Ocean acidification.

The 2025 update to the Planetary boundaries. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Credit: “Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2025”.

What does this mean? More stress on our ocean ecosystems. A considerable concern for our ocean-based industries such as fishing and shellfish and for the livelihoods of those who rely on the ocean for their way of life.

How do we reverse the trend? Stop brining fossil fuels. It is the new carbon we are adding to the atmosphere that is also being absorbed by our oceans and converted into carbonic acid that increases the acidity of the ocean.

You can read more about it here.

It’s hard to not go a day without the topic of AI coming up. As the game changing technology continues its rapid development across the globe businesses are forced to understand what this means for them today and into the future.

While the tech industry is well known for its excessive overhyping of new technologies there is no doubt that AI is an incredibly powerful tool that will reshape the global economy.

But as is the case with all new technologies its impact is dependent on how us humans choose to use it, or allow it to be used. While the ability of AI to produce content is nothing short of incredible, we cannot lose sight of its failings and risks.

For one, AI has been trained using content that is on the internet. There is a lot of cr*p on the internet and so businesses must ensure they always access the responses provide by AI tools with a healthy sense of scepticism. One quick and easy trick to aid this is to request your AI tool to always provide credible and reputable sources for its information and asking it to tell you how confident it is with its response. You can do this in your prompts or in the tool’s settings.

We also recommend making it clear to those within your business that if they choose to use AI they remain 100% responsible for the output it provides.

You can read our full AI Policy here.

Another key consideration for business is what to do with any considerable efficiency and productivity gains. Improved efficiency and productivity is a key selling point of all AI tools, but what does this mean for your business? Will it result in job loses? Will it result in improved productivity and decreased costs? Or will it result in staff retaining their jobs but having more time off?

Virtually every technology ever pitched to the global community claims that it will improve our lives by saving us time allowing us to do more of the things we love doing. Yet we still spend the large majority of our waking adult lives “working”.

This impact on jobs is a huge concern for many staff, so we advise business leaders to be open and honest with their people about their intentions for the use of AI. And being a sustainability consultancy that operates a 9-day fortnight and believes in giving staff more time to look after themselves and contribute to their communities, it won’t surprise you that we are strongly in favour of AI efficiency gains being used to reduce workload and stress, not reducing jobs or pay.

Further to this we can see AI being adopted by business at a rapid pace, so it is unlikely that any business that does achieve significant efficiency and productivity gains before others will maintain those for long. As is always the case in sustainability we highly recommend businesses consider the short-, medium-, and long-term implications.

While data-privacy and security are not areas we hold any expertise in at Go Well we do know that many AI tools require access to sensitive customer or employee data, and without robust safeguards, this can create legal, ethical, and reputational vulnerabilities. We recommend you consider this carefully when developing your own AI policy. You can read ours here.

Then there are the environmental impacts. It is well known that AI requires massive computing power to operate, that in turn requires huge amounts of energy to power and water to cool. This increasing demand for energy is coming at time in human history that we are desperately trying to reduce energy demand and supplement the fossil fuel generated energy with renewable.

While the tech companies behind AI are well aware of this, they’re also in a race against one another to achieve market share of the torrent of new AI users. You can imagine the tension that is creating, especially for their sustainability managers!!

So, in short, the best outcome is for AI to be powered 100% by renewable energy and we recommend you do some research in to the providers you are considering using.

In a similar vein we recommend understanding the impacts on water usage. A quick online search will find you many articles relating to huge data centres putting excessive strain on local water access. While there are data centres that operate a circular water system that minimises the volume extracted from the environment, this is not standard practice.

Both water and greenhouse gas impacts are heavily influenced by geographical location. New Zealand for example has a national electricity grid that fluctuates around 80-85% renewable, while Australia is virtually the opposite of this. Then within both countries there are regions that have an abundance of water and regions that regularly experience drought.

While the decisions of where data centres are located is largely down to the local authorities and the tech companies themselves, business mindful of their environmental impacts should consider this when choosing what AI tools they use.

An Update on The Right to Repair

You have likely heard by now the incredibly deflating news that the government plans to vote down the Right to Repair Amendment Bill.

Being a lead author in an open letter we collaborated on with some of our sustainability peers and repair experts and sent to MPs when the Bill was first brought to parliament (you can read that here) you can imagine how frustrated and let down we feel by this government decision.

The same authors collaborated gain on this open letter to convey these feelings.

What does this decision mean for NZ businesses. Just more of the same really. If you are wanting to incorporate repairs into your business strategy you are going to have to do it alone. While there are some fantastic examples out there of business having success with repairs, there is no hiding the effort and energy they have put into it.

One great example is Kowtow. Watch here a conversation our Founding Director Nick, had with Tessa Bradley, Head of Product and Sustainability in which they discuss the ins-and-outs of their repairs programme.

EU Adopts Extended Producer Responsibility for Textiles

We’re excited to see the European Union Parliament has just adopted world-leading rules on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for textiles — a major step for accountability and reducing unnecessary waste across the fashion & textile supply chain. These rules will shift cost, waste, and environmental burdens back onto producers and require full schemes for collection, sorting and recycling of textile waste.

A few highlights:
* All producers of textiles available in the EU will need to pay for collecting, sorting and recycling waste textiles.
* Member states have 30 months after the law enters into force to set up compliant EPR schemes. Micro-enterprises get an extra year.
* The regulation covers a wide scope: not just clothing & footwear, but also accessories, hats, blankets, bed and kitchen linen, curtains, etc.

Brands will need to rethink design, sourcing, durability, end-of-life. National regulators will have to build or enforce systems for sorting, recycling, and monitoring contributions. All this will require investment, systems change, collaboration.

If your company is trying to interpret these requirements, or figure out how to embed them into your design, operations, or supply chain strategy — feel free to reach out!

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