Tariff Amendment - Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS)
New Zealand, Costa Rica, Iceland and Switzerland have signed the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS). Domestic ratification for the Agreement has been completed and it will come into effect 1 July 2025.
Summary of the changes
One of the commitments under the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability is the elimination of import duties on a list of environmental goods. Annex 2 to ACCTS (available on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's website) sets out whether the elimination is applied to:
- all goods classified under the Harmonised System code (HS Code) specified; or
- a specific good described in the Additional Product Specification column, that relates to the HS Code specified.
On 1 July 2025, the Working Tariff Document of New Zealand (WTD) will be amended to reflect the elimination of import duties, by either:
- amending the duty rate for 234 tariff codes (reducing the duty rate to 0%); or
- retiring 352 tariff codes and replacing them with 646 new tariff codes, which is done to identify the environmental goods separately from the other goods not covered by ACCTS.
The amendment allows the elimination of the import duties to be applied to the environmental goods and the other goods to retain the existing duty rate.
An updated Master Correlation List is being published with the Working Tariff Documents to show the impacted tariff codes. The updated WTD pdfs will be published once the entirety of the 1 July amendment has been completed.
Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS)
The ACCTS is a ground-breaking trade agreement that delivers commercial opportunities to New Zealand’s economy, while addressing climate change and sustainability challenges. It is the first trade agreement New Zealand has concluded with Costa Rica, Iceland and Switzerland outside of the World Trade Organisation.
The text of this agreement can currently be found on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website at ACCTS text and resources. However, in due course the documents will transition to the Free trade agreements in force section on the MFAT website.
Tariff (ACCTS) Amendment Order 2025
The purpose of this Order is to make the relevant amendments to the WTD to give effect of the required elimination of import duties from ACCTS.
This Order is available below:
Further information
For more information on this tariff amendment, please contact the Valuation, Origin and Classification team (VOC) at voc@customs.govt.nz.