Air NZ, Chief Sustainability & Corporate Affairs Officer, Kiri Hannifin at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Australia Pacific 2025

Transcript

Kiri Hannifin:Getting to net zero by 2050 for aviation is incredibly difficult. We're one of the hardest, if not hardest, to abate sectors in the world. And still much of the technology and levers that we need as a sector are still very nascent or haven't actually even yet been developed. If you think about powered liquid fuel, for example, SAF. So certainly the road ahead, and it's not long to go, 25 years, is going to be very difficult for us. But, you know, Air New Zealand has been signed up to it with IATA. Our government has signed up via IKAO. We know that we've got no option but to decarbonize and to make the transition. And so as hard as it is, we feel very purposeful in the task that we have ahead and we work very hard every day. But yeah, it's not going to be easy. But when things get hard, the world is very good at coming up with solutions, and that's what we need for aviation. In 2024, Air New Zealand retracted its science-based target, which was a very difficult decision for the airline and one that we felt very disappointed to have to make. But what we have done earlier this year is we have announced a new approach, and that is a net emissions approach out to 2030. And what we've decided to do is that every year we will go to the market with an update. And why we're doing that is because, as you well know, decarbonization is quite lumpy. It's quite up and down, and we wanted to be radically transparent in how we're going. So we've set a range of between 20 and 25 net carbon emissions reduction by 2030. But every year in our financial reports— so we're just about to come to the market with our financial reports next month in August— we'll be updating the market and our customers and stakeholders about how we're tracking. So we, yeah, we just wanted to be very— we never wanted to be in a position again where we had to withdraw from a target. We didn't want to set a static target. We wanted to have something that we could actually— maybe we'll do better than we think. Maybe we'll do better than 20 to 25% range. But the approach is just to give an annual update so that everybody knows where we stand and we hold ourselves to account. I'm delighted to update you how Air New Zealand's going with our partner Beta, who are the supplier of our first all-electric battery aircraft. The good news is it's about to leave America and get on a boat and sail to New Zealand. It'll be arriving in Tauranga in New Zealand at the end of September or the first week of October. At that stage, it'll fly from Tauranga in a helicopter to Hamilton. We'll put it together and we will start flying it as a technical demonstrator. And what I mean by that is we'll fly under the FAA license. So it'll fly under the supplier Beta's license out of America as a demonstration aircraft in New Zealand. So we'll have Beta pilots along with our own. And we are just doing a technical demonstration, to test it in New Zealand, to see how it performs, to test it in routes that we probably might not fly it when it comes, when we buy our first plane and fly it ourselves. But it's a sort of 4 or 5 month testing situation with Beta, and we're incredibly excited. So it's not far away now. Kiri,

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