Engagement and best practice

Our goal is to reduce our long-term impact on the environment. Key to our success is engaging with stakeholders to better understand current and future pressures on the environment, and also share our own learning and experience to advance environmental sustainability with our peers.

Our global headquarters, ANZ Centre based in Melbourne’s Docklands was designed to be one of the most environmentally friendly buildings and has been awarded the ‘6 Star Green Star’ Design rating from the Green Building Council of Australia. Since opening, ANZ Centre has attracted significant interest from external parties including builders, architects, governments and educators, with hundreds of people visiting the Centre in the past year to learn more about these features and how they can implement similar initiatives in their own properties.

• Find out more about ANZ Centre

ANZ also works with stakeholders to better understand the impacts of climate change. This includes risks and opportunities for the community, our customers and clients and for the bank itself. These partnerships allow us to harness a source of market intelligence, consider and develop practical business solutions to a very complex issue. On a quarterly basis, ANZ Economics release research into the impact of climate change on sectors and the economy, which is distributed to over 4,000 recipients including 2,500 external subscribers.

Our staff play an important role in helping ANZ in achieving its environmental targets, whilst also reducing their own impact on the environment.

12,000 of our employees have been through training that directly supports responsible decision making in their roles or strengthens ANZ’s approach to managing environmental impacts.  For example, our sourcing category managers across the region have attended specific training designed to assist them in identifying the social and environmental issues relevant in their sourcing categories. Our senior Institutional bankers have also attended training on transaction level decision making.  Both of these courses have been delivered in partnership with industry experts and NGOs.

We also actively encourage our employees to participate in our volunteering and payroll giving programs, with many staff choosing to volunteer or make a contribution to a range of environment and conservation organisations such as Greening Australia and WWF.

For the fifth consecutive year ANZ sites in Australia, New Zealand and a number of locations in the Asia Pacific region took part in Earth Hour 2011, switching off non-essential lights for an hour on 26 March. This event highlights how energy saving can tackle global warming, and supports our focus on reducing our environmental footprint.