St Cuthbert’s takes first significant step towards Carbon Zero 2030 goal

Published December 1, 2020

Come on a journey with us to Carbon Zero 2030

This year our school community, like other communities globally, has faced the challenge of a serious pandemic. These unprecedented times saw Governments around the world take extraordinary action, at pace, to battle the spread of the virus.  

In New Zealand, our borders were closed, and we spent many weeks in lockdown, working together to keep people safe. We saw the finest of our St Cuthbert’s community come to the fore, with volunteers supporting our older members through phone calls, our Year 13 students helping us all to stay connected to one another, and our magnificent staff, who delivered a stunning remote learning experience to our students. We were reminded about the strength of our community and the power of a shared goal.  

As we move forward, we have the opportunity to do some things differently, learning from the experiences of the pandemic. Climate change continues to challenge the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, and we all need to look at how we can work together to reduce our carbon footprint to create a better and more sustainable future.

Carbon Zero 2030
We are delighted to announce that St Cuthbert’s has taken the first significant step towards becoming a Carbon Zero school through signing a contract with Toitū Envirocare, a company that assists organisations to achieve credible environmental certification.   

We have been working with them for some time now, and St Cuthbert’s hopes to become the first New Zealand school to achieve Toitū certification. While we do have existing initiatives in place to reduce our carbon emissions, joining Toitū means we will be supported to make changes with a clear and powerful strategic goal in place.

We are excited about being at the start of a journey towards creating a more sustainable environment. Toitū will assist us to really understand our true carbon liability, and to critically review all our practices, informing our plan to become Carbon Zero by 2030.    

Your support is important to us as we begin this journey, and we are looking forward to working with our staff, students, and our wider school community on a range of projects to support our goal. To this end, we will be putting together a taskforce from across our school community to help drive the project. 

Look out next year for ways in which you can become involved. We will be holding a parent symposium in March, with expert speakers and a workshop, to enable you to make a contribution.

There will also be a student symposium, and we will be encouraging our school community to work together with our staff on a whole school climate change education journey. 

This initiative is a significant development within the framework of Global Citizenship at St Cuthbert’s and supports your daughter to understand how she can make a contribution, and what will make the most significant differences to long-term climate outcomes. We have seen what we can do in a pandemic together, and we know that through working collectively, we can make a difference, taking strong action to achieve an important goal.