Awards for sustainability 

Back in the Noughties, when climate change was more generally referred to as ‘global warming’, you may have felt your hope for humankind quietly withering on the vine whenever anyone interpreted unseasonably hot days by chortling: ‘If this is global warming, bring it on’.

It can sometimes feel as though we haven’t progressed by so much as a micromillimetre since then, given the puzzling ubiquity of performative climate change deniers in seats of power and influence, wilfully oblivious to the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’.  Luckily, however, there are far more people out there for whom, go figure, presiding over an empire of ashes holds little appeal; infinitely more people who are actively engaged in doing whatever they can towards securing a survivable future for our beleaguered planet and life itself.

Here follows a list comprising just some of the most respected, influential and far-reaching global sustainability awards programmes. Why should businesses be interested? Because a category win in any one of these will add enormous reputational and financial value to any company, widening its commercial/networking horizons and heightening brand awareness while confirming its credentials as a proactive, principled, innovative, and ecology-conscious market leader in this increasingly crucial regard.

Global Good Awards

Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2025, Global Good Awards became the first awards scheme to gain ‘Outstanding’ accreditation from the Awards Trust Mark, back in 2018, and has maintained this rating ever since. In large part, this is due to the organisers’ own impeccable sustainability credentials, allied with the kind of scrupulousness, hypervigilance, and transparency that can only come from absolute independence. With no affiliations to (or vested interests in) large events or publishing companies, the GGA is well placed to spot and exclude ‘greenwashing’, the process whereby certain firms and even awards schemes present themselves as being more sustainable than they actually are.

Open to companies of any size from any country, with multiple categories including Community Partnership of the Year, Employee Engagement & Wellbeing, Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year, Educational Excellence, and (naturally) Global Good Company of the Year, the programme is set to be augmented in 2025 by the Global Good Finance Awards. This new incentive aims to accentuate and accelerate the finance sector’s enormous potential for effecting meaningful, widespread change in the arena of global sustainability. Open to purpose-driven B2B and B2C financial organisations, the GGFA encompasses categories for Company-Based, Transformation, Individual/Team, Activity-Led, and Customer-Led entries.

Other such programmes aimed specifically at the financial sector include the ESG & Sustainability Awards and the Digital Banker Global Sustainable Finance Awards. The former commendably seeks to identify and honour the best ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) performance in line with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals: the latter also considers this aspect within a broad remit to salute businesses ‘…driving sustainable finance and responsible investment practices across products, services, solutions, projects and initiatives.’

International Sustainability Awards

Also new for 2025, the International Sustainability Awards (ISA) have been introduced following the success of their parent event, the Gulf Sustainability Awards. Where the latter (Outstanding Trust Mark-awarded) programme has been running with great success for eight years, staging annual awards presentations in Dubai to recognise exemplary sustainability initiatives across the Middle East, the ISA is opening the field to the global space, with prizegiving hosted online. Categories for both programmes are grouped together under three headings – Environmental Sustainability, CSR Excellence, and People in Sustainability – and both allow businesses to submit entries for multiple categories. Boost Awards’ Managing Director, Chris Robinson, has hosted webinars for the GSA on How To Write A Winning Entry and How To Create A Winning Presentation, and is set to do the same for the ISA.

Global Sustainability and ESG Awards

Another of the most celebrated awards for sustainability, the Global Sustainability & ESG Awards are organised by Sustainability magazine and are open to all businesses, offering 17 categories including Sustainable Supply Chain Award, Social Impact Award, and Diversity & Inclusion Award. The awards are topped by the non-entry Lifetime Achievement Award, which honours ‘…a sustainability executive who has dedicated their career to responsible business.’ In a neat embodiment of the awards’ ethos, the winner in each category receives a Sustainability & ESG Award made from 100% recycled glass.

World Sustainability Awards

Self-described as ‘The Benchmark for Sustainable Impact’, the World Sustainability Awards wear this mantle with commendable earnestness, advising entrants that: ‘Committing to progress in corporate sustainability requires a passion for change and resilience in order to succeed.’ Categories herein include Carbon Reduction Award, Social Impact Award, Eco Design Award, and Future Leader Award.

National Sustainability Awards

Open to businesses with a UK office or any kind of UK presence, the National Sustainability Awards are a reflection of the vigour and determination demonstrated across the National Sustainability News website: itself a key mouthpiece for expanding and progressing the sustainability conversation. Again, companies are welcome to submit entries across multiple categories, examples of which include Carbon Reduction Project, Water Conservation Award, Use of Data and Analytics, and Sustainable Packaging Award.

Reuters Events Sustainability Awards

Established 14 years ago, the Reuters Events Sustainability Awards programme holds a certain cachet for being among the frontrunners in this sphere. Its 16 awards are spread across four pillars, these being Climate & Nature; Strategy & Leadership; Driving Social Change; and Reporting & Investment.

edie Awards

The edie Awards programme has similar bragging rights for longevity. Now in its 18th year, the programme features 24 categories, several of which – ESG Strategy of the Year, Supply Chain Sustainability Project of the Year, B Corp of the Year, NGO of the Year, and Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Project of the Year – are new for 2025. Luke Nicholls, edie’s Content Director, describes these awards as ‘the Oscars of sustainable business.’ Meanwhile, the conjoined edie Net-Zero Awards celebrate ‘the best of industrial decarbonisation’, with categories including Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year, Energy Efficiency Project of the Year, and Net-Zero Hero. 

Energy Globe Award

The Energy Globe Award is an international accolade which, in 2022, combined a physical awards presentation with online streaming, thereby opening out the ceremony to a record-breaking global audience in excess of 250million people. Rather poetically, its categories are split into the elements – Earth, Water, Fire, and Air – plus a future-focused Youth category. Between them, these can accommodate submissions for projects based upon, e.g., reforestation, renewable energy, wastewater treatment, reduction of greenhouse gases, and environmental education. The award is free to enter, and entries are received from over 180 countries each year. 

Sustainability Delivery Awards

Organised by the international Environment Analyst community, the Sustainability Delivery Awards recognise ‘ESG innovation, achievement and leadership.’ Categories include Transformational Partnership Award, Transportation Project of the Year, Remediation Project of the Year, and Nature Positive Award.

Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Awards

The organisers behind the US-based Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Awards proudly claim to have generated ‘the first crowdsourced awards program[me] to operate with the level of transparency we’ve committed ourselves to.’ Welcoming organisations of all sizes, these awards are focused upon just six categories: Sustainability Leadership Award, Sustainability Initiative of the Year, Sustainability Product of the Year, Sustainability Service of the Year, Sustainability Hero (Executive), and Sustainability Champion (Nonexecutive).

AIPH World Green City Awards

The Association Internationale des Producteurs de l’Horticulture (AIPH), which translates as the International Association of Horticultural Producers, organises this biennial Green City Awards programme, next scheduled to take place in 2026. Uniquely, the programme exists to reward city authorities which can demonstrate an exceptional integration of plants and nature in the planning, design and operation of their urban environments. Aspects spotlit within the programme’s seven categories include urban ecosystem restoration, social cohesion and inclusive communities, and health and wellbeing.

Specific industries also have their own sustainability award programmes. Again, there’s a dizzying amount – far too many to list – but a sample selection could include the Sustainability in Tech Awards for the IT sector, the self-explanatory Sustainability Awards (Packaging) doing a sterling job of ‘setting the agenda on best practice… and watching out for unintended consequences’, and the Marie Claire UK Sustainability Awards, inviting entries from sustainability-conscious businesses in the worlds of Fashion; Home & Lifestyle; Parenting; Food & Drink; Beauty, Health & Wellness; Travel & Leisure; and Motors. Meanwhile, the Transport & Logistics Middle East Game-Changers in Sustainability & Technology Awards are both region- and industry-specific, training a spotlight on the region’s transport infrastructure which is as tightly focused as the name of the award programme itself is generously proportioned. And just to prove that there’s a galvanic sustainability award programme for every sector, however niche, the TIACA Air Cargo Sustainability Awards seek to reward solutions which align with the eight key objectives expressed in The International Air Cargo Association’s Sustainability Roadmap (including ‘Protect Biodiversity’ and ‘Eliminate Waste’).

Hope for a sustainable future?

UCLA Sustainability sagely observes that: ‘In simplest terms, sustainability is about our children and grandchildren, and the world we will leave them.’ The sustainability awards highlighted above represent fertile grounds for hope: good people providing platforms to celebrate, encourage, unite and promote others working for the common good.

Cheeringly, sustainability is finding its way into awards programmes of all descriptions. Categories for Net Zero initiatives are now commonplace, rewarding those working towards the target of ‘…completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, to be achieved by reducing emissions and implementing methods of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.’ (As defined by Oxford Languages.)

We are also starting to see the first stirrings of ‘AI in Sustainability’ categories, although a note of caution may be appropriate here. For the moment at least, the effort needed to offset AI’s own substantial carbon footprint feels prohibitive. The MIT Technology Review, among other learned and authoritative sources, has noted the troubling amounts of energy and water currently required to run AI data centres and cool their servers, although new technologies will hopefully improve this picture over time.

At this point, it’s also hard to see how the social equity aspect of sustainability can be balanced against the palpable threat AI poses for people’s livelihoods. Formulating a genuinely proportionate, rational, society-focused relationship with AI may well prove tricky in the coming months and years. In and of itself, AI is neither sentient, benevolent, nor malevolent: it’s indifferent, which is arguably even more unsettling. But that’s another hot potato for another day.

Awards for sustainability 

Back in the Noughties, when climate change was more generally referred to as ‘global warming’, you may have felt your hope for humankind quietly withering on the vine whenever anyone interpreted unseasonably hot days by chortling: ‘If this is global warming, bring it on’.

It can sometimes feel as though we haven’t progressed by so much as a micromillimetre since then, given the puzzling ubiquity of performative climate change deniers in seats of power and influence, wilfully oblivious to the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’.  Luckily, however, there are far more people out there for whom, go figure, presiding over an empire of ashes holds little appeal; infinitely more people who are actively engaged in doing whatever they can towards securing a survivable future for our beleaguered planet and life itself.

‘Sustainability’ has, not unreasonably, become an aptly hot topic in recent years: but far from being a mere buzzword, it’s a deeply pragmatic philosophy of universal relevance which should really be a fundamental, mandated, cross-industry principle, for everyone and everything’s sake. One shouldn’t have to point out that responsible custodianship of our world and its finite resources is a moral and practical imperative, not a faddish affectation: but, well, here we are.

The cheering news is that the vast majority of corporate bodies are now keenly aware that sustainability equates to a vital, holistic interrelation between environmental health, social equity and economic success, and are consequently building sustainable practices into the very fabric of their processes and policies. Better still, an entire canon of sustainability awards now exists to encourage, reward, and supercharge the profile of those companies which, with Boost’s expert assistance, can prove to awarding bodies that they are going the extra mile to make sustainability a core precept.

Here follows a list comprising just some of the most respected, influential and far-reaching global sustainability awards programmes. Why should businesses be interested? Because a category win in any one of these will add enormous reputational and financial value to any company, widening its commercial/networking horizons and heightening brand awareness while confirming its credentials as a proactive, principled, innovative, and ecology-conscious market leader in this increasingly crucial regard.

Global Good Awards

Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2025, Global Good Awards became the first awards scheme to gain ‘Outstanding’ accreditation from the Awards Trust Mark, back in 2018, and has maintained this rating ever since. In large part, this is due to the organisers’ own impeccable sustainability credentials, allied with the kind of scrupulousness, hypervigilance, and transparency that can only come from absolute independence. With no affiliations to (or vested interests in) large events or publishing companies, the GGA is well placed to spot and exclude ‘greenwashing’, the process whereby certain firms and even awards schemes present themselves as being more sustainable than they actually are.

Open to companies of any size from any country, with multiple categories including Community Partnership of the Year, Employee Engagement & Wellbeing, Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year, Educational Excellence, and (naturally) Global Good Company of the Year, the programme is set to be augmented in 2025 by the Global Good Finance Awards. This new incentive aims to accentuate and accelerate the finance sector’s enormous potential for effecting meaningful, widespread change in the arena of global sustainability. Open to purpose-driven B2B and B2C financial organisations, the GGFA encompasses categories for Company-Based, Transformation, Individual/Team, Activity-Led, and Customer-Led entries.

Other such programmes aimed specifically at the financial sector include the ESG & Sustainability Awards and the Digital Banker Global Sustainable Finance Awards. The former commendably seeks to identify and honour the best ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) performance in line with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals: the latter also considers this aspect within a broad remit to salute businesses ‘…driving sustainable finance and responsible investment practices across products, services, solutions, projects and initiatives.’

International Sustainability Awards

Also new for 2025, the International Sustainability Awards (ISA) have been introduced following the success of their parent event, the Gulf Sustainability Awards. Where the latter (Outstanding Trust Mark-awarded) programme has been running with great success for eight years, staging annual awards presentations in Dubai to recognise exemplary sustainability initiatives across the Middle East, the ISA is opening the field to the global space, with prizegiving hosted online. Categories for both programmes are grouped together under three headings – Environmental Sustainability, CSR Excellence, and People in Sustainability – and both allow businesses to submit entries for multiple categories. Boost Awards’ Managing Director, Chris Robinson, has hosted webinars for the GSA on How To Write A Winning Entry and How To Create A Winning Presentation, and is set to do the same for the ISA.

Global Sustainability and ESG Awards

Another of the most celebrated awards for sustainability, the Global Sustainability & ESG Awards are organised by Sustainability magazine and are open to all businesses, offering 17 categories including Sustainable Supply Chain Award, Social Impact Award, and Diversity & Inclusion Award. The awards are topped by the non-entry Lifetime Achievement Award, which honours ‘…a sustainability executive who has dedicated their career to responsible business.’ In a neat embodiment of the awards’ ethos, the winner in each category receives a Sustainability & ESG Award made from 100% recycled glass.

World Sustainability Awards

Self-described as ‘The Benchmark for Sustainable Impact’, the World Sustainability Awards wear this mantle with commendable earnestness, advising entrants that: ‘Committing to progress in corporate sustainability requires a passion for change and resilience in order to succeed.’ Categories herein include Carbon Reduction Award, Social Impact Award, Eco Design Award, and Future Leader Award.

National Sustainability Awards

Open to businesses with a UK office or any kind of UK presence, the National Sustainability Awards are a reflection of the vigour and determination demonstrated across the National Sustainability News website: itself a key mouthpiece for expanding and progressing the sustainability conversation. Again, companies are welcome to submit entries across multiple categories, examples of which include Carbon Reduction Project, Water Conservation Award, Use of Data and Analytics, and Sustainable Packaging Award.

Reuters Events Sustainability Awards

Established 14 years ago, the Reuters Events Sustainability Awards programme holds a certain cachet for being among the frontrunners in this sphere. Its 16 awards are spread across four pillars, these being Climate & Nature; Strategy & Leadership; Driving Social Change; and Reporting & Investment.

edie Awards

The edie Awards programme has similar bragging rights for longevity. Now in its 18th year, the programme features 24 categories, several of which – ESG Strategy of the Year, Supply Chain Sustainability Project of the Year, B Corp of the Year, NGO of the Year, and Diversity, Equality & Inclusion Project of the Year – are new for 2025. Luke Nicholls, edie’s Content Director, describes these awards as ‘the Oscars of sustainable business.’ Meanwhile, the conjoined edie Net-Zero Awards celebrate ‘the best of industrial decarbonisation’, with categories including Behaviour Change Campaign of the Year, Energy Efficiency Project of the Year, and Net-Zero Hero.

The International Green Apple Awards for Environmental Best Practice

An even earlier sustainability awards programme, The International Green Apple Awards has been operating since 1994 under the stewardship of the non-profit, non-political Green Organisation, which also arranges the Green World Awards. The self-explanatory Awards for Environmental Best Practice act as the official feeder scheme into the Green World Awards, and carry the significant distinction of a presentation ceremony staged in the Houses of Parliament. The Green World Awards, meanwhile, are presented in a different country every year, with the highest scorer from each category being declared a Green World Champion.

Energy Globe Award

The Energy Globe Award is an international accolade which, in 2022, combined a physical awards presentation with online streaming, thereby opening out the ceremony to a record-breaking global audience in excess of 250million people. Rather poetically, its categories are split into the elements – Earth, Water, Fire, and Air – plus a future-focused Youth category. Between them, these can accommodate submissions for projects based upon, e.g., reforestation, renewable energy, wastewater treatment, reduction of greenhouse gases, and environmental education. The award is free to enter, and entries are received from over 180 countries each year.

Sustainability Delivery Awards

Organised by the international Environment Analyst community, the Sustainability Delivery Awards recognise ‘ESG innovation, achievement and leadership.’ Categories include Transformational Partnership Award, Transportation Project of the Year, Remediation Project of the Year, and Nature Positive Award.

Sustainable Future Awards

With 29 categories available, the Sustainable Future Awards honour those who share their vision of a bright tomorrow wherein ‘…goods and services can be produced and provided in ways that do not use resources that cannot be replaced, and that do not damage the environment.’ The categories are grouped under four headings: Recycling Excellence and Innovation, Energy Excellence and Innovation, Circular Economy Innovation, and Overall Achievement.

Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Awards

The organisers behind the US-based Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Awards proudly claim to have generated ‘the first crowdsourced awards program[me] to operate with the level of transparency we’ve committed ourselves to.’ Welcoming organisations of all sizes, these awards are focused upon just six categories: Sustainability Leadership Award, Sustainability Initiative of the Year, Sustainability Product of the Year, Sustainability Service of the Year, Sustainability Hero (Executive), and Sustainability Champion (Nonexecutive).

AIPH World Green City Awards

The Association Internationale des Producteurs de l’Horticulture (AIPH), which translates as the International Association of Horticultural Producers, organises this biennial Green City Awards programme, next scheduled to take place in 2026. Uniquely, the programme exists to reward city authorities which can demonstrate an exceptional integration of plants and nature in the planning, design and operation of their urban environments. Aspects spotlit within the programme’s seven categories include urban ecosystem restoration, social cohesion and inclusive communities, and health and wellbeing.

Regional and industry-specific sustainability awards

The above programmes are just a sample of the myriad sustainability awards that already exist; and it’s worth emphasising that there are almost as many which cater for specific regions. To cite just a handful of examples, business leaders in Asia can enter the Asia Corporate Excellence & Sustainability Awards, while the Asia Pacific Sustainability Action Awards are open to companies, government agencies, universities, hospitals, non-profit organisations and even cities in Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region. Closer to home, the All-Ireland Sustainability Awards champion the efforts of organisations, communities and individuals who are leading the charge to optimise Ireland’s sustainable future. The programme’s categories include plaudits for the most outstanding Green Exporter, Sustainable Tourism & Hospitality Initiative, and Food Waste Reduction Initiative.

Specific industries also have their own sustainability award programmes. Again, there’s a dizzying amount – far too many to list – but a sample selection could include the Sustainability in Tech Awards for the IT sector, the self-explanatory Sustainability Awards (Packaging) doing a sterling job of ‘setting the agenda on best practice… and watching out for unintended consequences’, and the Marie Claire UK Sustainability Awards, inviting entries from sustainability-conscious businesses in the worlds of Fashion; Home & Lifestyle; Parenting; Food & Drink; Beauty, Health & Wellness; Travel & Leisure; and Motors. Meanwhile, the Transport & Logistics Middle East Game-Changers in Sustainability & Technology Awards are both region- and industry-specific, training a spotlight on the region’s transport infrastructure which is as tightly focused as the name of the award programme itself is generously proportioned. And just to prove that there’s a galvanic sustainability award programme for every sector, however niche, the TIACA Air Cargo Sustainability Awards seek to reward solutions which align with the eight key objectives expressed in The International Air Cargo Association’s Sustainability Roadmap (including ‘Protect Biodiversity’ and ‘Eliminate Waste’).

Hope for a sustainable future?

UCLA Sustainability sagely observes that: ‘In simplest terms, sustainability is about our children and grandchildren, and the world we will leave them.’ The sustainability awards highlighted above represent fertile grounds for hope: good people providing platforms to celebrate, encourage, unite and promote others working for the common good.

Cheeringly, sustainability is finding its way into awards programmes of all descriptions. Categories for Net Zero initiatives are now commonplace, rewarding those working towards the target of ‘…completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, to be achieved by reducing emissions and implementing methods of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.’ (As defined by Oxford Languages.)

We are also starting to see the first stirrings of ‘AI in Sustainability’ categories, although a note of caution may be appropriate here. For the moment at least, the effort needed to offset AI’s own substantial carbon footprint feels prohibitive. The MIT Technology Review, among other learned and authoritative sources, has noted the troubling amounts of energy and water currently required to run AI data centres and cool their servers, although new technologies will hopefully improve this picture over time.

At this point, it’s also hard to see how the social equity aspect of sustainability can be balanced against the palpable threat AI poses for people’s livelihoods. Formulating a genuinely proportionate, rational, society-focused relationship with AI may well prove tricky in the coming months and years. In and of itself, AI is neither sentient, benevolent, nor malevolent: it’s indifferent, which is arguably even more unsettling. But that’s another hot potato for another day.

In the meantime, we at Boost Awards are eager and able to assist our clients in achieving due recognition for their sustainability projects or policies, collectively playing our part to support the planet and everyone that lives on it. Here’s to the ethical, the compassionate, the egalitarian, the humanitarian, the motivated, the accountable. Here’s to responsible businesses, and the caring individuals within them, who are sufficiently far-sighted as to see beyond the boundary wall of the golf course.

We look forward to hearing from you and helping you win awards.

Marco.

(C) This article was written by Marco Rossi and is the intellectual property of award entry consultants Boost Awards