Sustainability approach

Sustainable business is good business. It’s our responsibility to make good long-term decisions and support a strong economy into the future. We assess and balance risks and opportunities to drive long-term value for our customers, colleagues, shareholders and the communities in which we operate.

Our sustainability strategy

We are acting now for the long term. NAB's sustainability approach is built on our customers' needs, prioritising three environmental and social areas of commercial opportunity.

1. Climate: support our customers as we move to a resilient net zero economy.
2. Housing affordability: support the building of more affordable homes for more Australians.
3. First Nations: support the economic empowerment and prosperity of First Nations peoples and businesses.

How we approach sustainability 

We leverage our expertise as a bank to address social and environmental challenges at scale.

As an inaugural signatory to the United Nations’ Environment Programme Finance Initiative Principles for Responsible Banking, we aim to ensure our business activities contribute to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the goals of the Paris Agreement.

We embed sustainability management and reporting into governance structures and internal communications to ensure they’re understood by all our colleagues.

NAB’s Sustainability Forum oversees our sustainability strategy and acts as an escalation point for sustainability-related matters.

Oversight of our sustainability activities rests with the NAB Board, which receives updates at least bi-annually on our environmental, social and governance risks (ESG), sustainability strategy, and other related matters.

We engage with a wide range of stakeholders and use their input and feedback to help inform our decisions. Find out more about our engagement with stakeholders.

Supporting global cooperation on the SDGs

As a large bank, the finance we provide spreads across almost all activities, which means we have direct and indirect impacts on each of the 17 SDGs. These impacts are both positive and negative.

We use the SDG framework to:

• innovate and create products and services that meet our customers’ needs.
• guide our strategy to prioritise headline goals where we can play a transformative role.

We have aligned our strategy’s priority areas with relevant SDGs where we can make a difference to the societal challenges.

Our priority goals are:

• #7 Affordable and clean energy
• #8 Decent work and economic growth
• #9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
• #11 Sustainable cities and communities
• #13 Climate action
• #15 Life on land

These headline goals are areas where we’re working to achieve transformative impact. We regularly review these priorities as our operating context changes.