Our purpose is to mobilise New Zealand’s most ambitious businesses to make sustainability a key driver for competitiveness and resilience.
SBC brings together New Zealand’s most ambitious businesses to accelerate sustainable growth, competitiveness, and resilience.
As the New Zealand partner of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and part of the BusinessNZ network, we connect members to global best practice, national influence and collective action opportunities that are difficult to achieve alone.
Our approach centres on three key audiences:
- CEOs and senior executives, who set ambition, navigate trade-offs and lead publicly;
- Sustainability professionals, who translate that ambition into practical delivery within organisations; and
- Government, where we leverage the insights and experiences of our members to help remove barriers and shape the policy settings needed for long-term sustainable growth
What we offer
Through SBC, our members gain:
Executive-led leadership
Opportunities for CEOs, executives and sustainability leaders to connect, learn and lead publicly, demonstrating progress, sharing insights and inspiring wider business action.
Global connection
Access to WBCSD insights, programmes, tools, international networks and global best practice, translated for the New Zealand context and emerging business priorities.
National influence
A trusted and credible collective voice that helps shape policy, markets and public debate, amplified through SBC’s connection to the BusinessNZ network.
Trusted convening
Powerful networks and trusted relationships that bring together businesses, sectors and stakeholders to unlock partnerships, innovation and shared solutions.
Collective action
Participation in high-impact initiatives and collaborations that deliver measurable outcomes and system-level change that no single organisation could achieve alone. SBC challenges and supports our members to lead, holding them to account on their commitments, while championing those who are setting the pace.
Leadership starts with action, and our members demonstrate how sustainability can drive competitiveness, resilience and prosperity.
SBC is an active platform for leadership, influence, and impact.
What we expect
When joining SBC, members must meet our member commitments which include being an active and engaged member, disclosing publicly on sustainability, and making progress on environmental, social and governance issues.
Every two years SBC reviews each member and tells them where they could go further to meet their commitments.
We reserve the right to ask members who don’t meet their commitments to leave SBC.
Our partners
We actively look to collaborate and partner with organisations that can enable us to achieve our vision.
This includes BusinessNZ (SBC is part of the Business NZ network), the Climate Leaders Coalition (CLC), the Climate Change Commission and other relevant government agencies.
We also work with other like-minded organisations such as the Sustainable Business Network and the Aotearoa Circle.
Our principles
We recognise that sustainability challenges must be tackled systematically.
We operate in an agile way that allows us to respond to emerging issues and member need, co-designing solutions to drive change.
We are guided by the principles that businesses that have sustainability at their core are more successful over the long term; the principle of kaitiakitanga; and that our actions should be practical and impactful.
Our Priority Areas
SBC focuses its effort on areas where collective business leadership can drive meaningful change.
Sustainability & Climate
In addition to our priority areas, we have other areas of work that we focus on.