Business value of Nature
Vidal Garza Cantú, FEMSA Foundation
Vidal Garza Cantú, Director of the FEMSA Foundation, was recognized for being a major force in helping companies understand that well-functioning natural ecosystems are a business and economic imperative, not a matter of philanthropy. Under Garza’s leadership, the FEMSA Foundation helped launch the Latin American Water Funds Partnership, to conserve and restore forests and grasslands around watersheds, safeguarding their ability to offer services such as water retention and filtration without the need for costly and inefficient manmade alternatives. Garza’s charismatic and passionate leadership–coupled with his hardheaded business experience–is influencing companies worldwide to think about the true business value of Nature.
Considered design standard
Hannah Jones, Nike
As head of Nike’s Sustainable Business and Innovation team, Hannah Jones leads a global team responsible for enabling Nike’s sustainable growth. Her numerous accomplishments include leading Nike to implement the Considered Design standard, which marries performance and innovation with sustainability to create products with a lower environmental footprint, and rolling out its Sustainable Manufacturing & Sourcing Index (SMSI), an innovation that puts environmental and labor metrics on equal footing with traditional supply chain measures of performance.
Sustainability linked to a company’s financial success
Kurt Kuehn, UPS
Kurt Kuehn, The CFO of UPS, was honored for being one of the first prominent CFOs in the world to articulate why sustainability is fundamentally linked to a company’s financial success. Kuehn has been vocal in public forums about how sustainability can reduce costs, mitigate risks, generate new revenue opportunities, fuel innovation, and help companies attract and retain top talent. For over a decade, Kuehn has shaped UPS’s sustainability strategy, including their very first sustainability report in 2002. As a CFO, his vocal, visible sustainability leadership is one of the surest signs that UPS is truly building sustainability into its DNA.
The C.K. Prahalad Award, created in 2010 to honor founding CEF Advisory Board member C.K. Prahalad, recognizes exceptional, globally significant private section action that exemplifies the fundamental connection between sustainability, innovation and long-term business success in a globalizing world. The Prahalad Award seeks to honor globally significant action(s) by companies, individuals, and/or collaborations in any or all of the following areas:
Nominations for the 2014 Prahalad Award will be accepted on this page beginning November 1, 2013.
2012 winners were Neil Hawkins, Dow Chemical, The Sustainable Apparel Coalition and Unilever CEO Paul Polman.
http://www.corporateecoforum.com/c-k-prahalad-award/
