04 - True Connection

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True provenance, true to nature and true for generations

This image depicts our Moana brand story, launched in 2016. When our Sustainability Working Group met earlier this year to begin refreshing our sustainability journey, the tasks we wanted to achieve rang true to our values (manaakitanga, whakapapa, whakatipuranga and kaitiakitanga) and to our Moana brand story.

This image depicts our Moana brand story, launched in 2016

Our story is of ‘true connection’. True provenance, true to nature and true for generations. It shows the connection between our people, our product and our place. The interconnectedness shows the responsibility of sustainability sits with all of us. We all have our part to play in reducing our impacts on the environment, be that at work, within our communities and at home.

With one of our core values being kaitiakitanga, we recognise the importance of going above and beyond what is legally required of us. To be kaitiaki today requires investing in not only lessening our footprint, but where we can also support activities that regenerate people and nature.

Being true to our values requires being a responsible, ambitious and innovative company that invests in the right initiatives to underpin our future operations and profitability.

As a seafood company Moana New Zealand depends on thriving fish stocks and on harbours for our farming operations. These occur in the natural marine environment that we have minimal control over. What we can control is how we interact with the environment and our associated behaviours. We can also encourage partners to share in our journey to bring about change.

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Sustainability

Living our values in everything we do. We acknowledge the connection between ngā tangata me te taiao (people and the environment) which are to be honoured for future generations.

Led by tikanga and to be true to our value of kaitiakitanga, we engage with iwi, staff and stakeholders to identify, invest in and solve key sustainability challenges.

Key areas of focus

01.

Engagement

Rolling out this strategy to our people and ensuring they understand our aspirations and how we can all play your part is key to our success. This is a journey for us all.

This strategy will be underpinned by a robust measurement system so we can better understand benefits and enable sound decision making in the future.

We know there is a lot of work to do and we can’t do it alone. We are committed to continuing to build strong partnership that activate meaningful change at pace. We invite you along on our journey.

02.

Lighten our harvest and farming

This project involves us getting a better understanding on where we do and don’t fish and why.

We want to understand what habitats or areas are significant and why. Overlaying this with where we currently fish will assist in making good decisions on where we fish in the future.

In our farming operations, our tio team have already started the tio transformation project which reduces 99 percent of in-water infrastructure and significantly improves working conditions for our people.

03.

Plastic and packaging

We have already begun getting a baseline of what plastics we use and we’re constantly looking at alternatives to design out hard to recycle plastics.

We intend to work with suppliers to develop recycling programmes for products where no environmentally friendly alternative exists.

04.

Climate change response

We’ve set an ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2040.

To get there we will be taking an in-depth look into where we can reduce our carbon emissions and understand what investment is required for change.

We know, in the short term, there will be areas where we will be unable to make significant shifts because technology doesn’t yet exist. For emissions we can’t eliminate, we will be looking at how can we offset our remaining emissions by planting trees. The right trees, in the right place.

05.

Minimise use of fresh water

Water is precious resource and with the impacts of climate change, will be more so into the future. We need to change our behaviours around the use of fresh water today, for tomorrow.

We’ll be reducing our use wherever possible through measuring and investing in equipment and processes that drive water efficiencies.

Harvesting rainwater is one way we intend to reduce our use of freshwater and already have a pilot programme in place in our Nelson based tio hatchery.

We are Aotearoa’s largest Māori owned kaimoana and kai ora company, owned by all Iwi. Our values set down by our shareholders, are what guide our decision making everyday. Our story is one of true connection, true provenance, true to nature and true for generations.

It shows connection between our people, our product and our place.

Lightening our harvest footprint

Ko Mark Ngata tāku ingoa (my name is Mark Ngata), te Kaiwhakahaere mō ngā mahi ika ki uta mo Moana New Zealand.

This year we refreshed our sustainability strategy and one of the key priority areas that we identified was lightening our harvest footprint and practices.

This is an ambitious agenda. To be true to our value of kaitiakitanga, we had to align with Aotearoa’s ecosystem based management agenda and there are two key areas to that. The first one is working with our fishers collaboratively to understand where we are currently fishing.

The second part of that is understanding areas of significance to our people, Iwi, and other stakeholders. The information that comes from that will indicate to us where we need to be fishing in the future.

We’ve invested heavily in fishing technology. An example of this is Precision Seafood Harvesting which focuses on selectivity of catch. Approximately 14% of our fishers use the bottom contact methods. Those fishers have had cameras on their vessels for the last eight years, which really indicates the commitment that we have to responsible fishing.

We’re very proud of the exemplary behaviour of our fishers and we want to ensure they are continuously upskilled through our responsible fisher training programmes, through wellbeing programmes that looks after their health. They are the future of our fishing and it’s very important to the company that they not only are well looked after, but that they understand clearly our expectations.

Lightening our aquaculture footprint

We’ve begun transforming how we grow oysters. We have an ambitious target to double our volume by 2026. The investment in a new hatchery increases reliability of spat supply, a critical success factor that underpins Moana’s growth strategy.

As a proudly indigenous commercial business with long term views, Iwi are our shareholders and remain at the heart of every we do. Māori are involved throughout our oyster business and there have been academic, enterprise and community opportunities as a result of being in their rohe (area).

Pacific oysters have been grown on long lines, in floating baskets for decades and Moana has been growing single seed oysters in baskets since 2009. What is different about this new system, is the orientation of the basket on the line and the introduction of an axel. This enables the basket to rotate, which then enables semi-automation and with this, removal of 99.5% of the wooden infrastructure.

To give you a sense of scale, in Whangaroa alone, we will be removing over 180,000 posts and 90,000 rails, equivalent to over 400 kilometres of wooden infrastructure and replacing it with 857 posts.

The reduction in siltation through the wooden infrastructure being removed improves water flow underneath the floating lines. There’s also a reduction in ecosystem disturbance because people are no longer having to hop off the barge and work on the actual seabed floor.

The change in technology is simple but transformational.

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The beginning of our decarbonisation roadmap

Our people are our greatest asset. Having set an ambitious target of carbon neutral by 2040, when it came to beginning our decarbonisation journey, it’s our people that have had the greatest ideas on just how we can get there.

One of the key focus areas that arose from our materiality assessment was to improve operations through employee consultation. We listened.

In August we brought together a group of Moana people from all parts of our business, in varying roles. The task was to not only brainstorm ideas to reduce our carbon emissions but also to think about our freshwater consumption and opportunities to use less.

We’re now working through those ideas to identify what technology or innovations exist to support these ideas and measure emissions saved through implementation.

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Our community connection

Moana are proud to support the communities in which we operate. Here’s a couple of examples.

Hone Martin - Papa Honez One Whānau At A Time Founder

The Kai Ika Project - Supporting our community

Our People