This is the first year that the Mail & Guardian has hosted the Greening the Future-Investing in the Environment Awards and we have learnt a lot in the process of choosing winners.
The panel of judges, with their rich diversity of views, brings to the awards integrity, authority and respectability.
We believe that the awards’ integrity did not lie in churning out of yet another occasion for ‘green-washing” companies. In this sense, the awards are unlike any others. They also serve as a vehicle for shaping policy orientation and discourse on environmental governance within the corporate sector.
We do not wish to do this by embarrassing companies or scolding them, but through collegial nudging, advice and proud display of their honest engagement with the issues. This should be the core premise and value orientation of Greening the Future.
The awards focus on environmental impacts within the broader umbrella of sustainable development. They seek to change the behaviour of companies, foundations, SMMEs and civic organisations by rewarding honest engagement with the concerns of stakeholders, and recognising and celebrating innovation where it is being practised.
Most importantly, the awards look for projects or initiatives that make a difference — both within the organisations submitting the entries and to the lives of people they have a relationship with outside the company.
The panellists, in reviewing the 22 entries received this year, were also looking for leadership; how companies or organisations outline their goals and measure their performance against them; and how they set their targets and incorporate environmental impact as part of their overall risk assessment and governance.
In the category for corporations, we struggled to find an outright winner based on the information received in the entries. None of the corporations fully met the judges’ expectations. We decided to award two special commendations in this category, in recognition that these companies are not ‘quite there”, but are making the right efforts.
In the category for ‘most improved environmental practices”, we looked for a balance between what has been done well and what has not. We also looked at how companies are building stakeholder concerns into improvement measures and how indicators are being set.
A number of high-quality sustainability reports were entered. It is encouraging to note that many companies regard sustainability reporting as a serious business, not just another PR tool at their disposal.
I am confident that, given the good public standing of the M&G and the calibre of the judges, the Greening the Future Awards will prove to be more than just another environmental competition. It provides a way of giving companies high-quality feedback and bringing to the attention of the public attempts to improve corporate governance in our society.