2017 Greening the future awards categories
Sudley Adams Memorial Award:
This award was created in memory of Sudley Adams, the former Mail & Guardian brand manager who convened the Greening the Future Awards and made them a success. The winner should best embody and represent Sudley’s forward-thinking vision and team spirit. The winner must be a holistic project — one that brings various elements into a whole that works towards a better future.
Energy efficiency and carbon management:
This category showcases organisations and companies that demonstrate best practice in reducing their energy use and their carbon emissions. In a country where electricity was cheap and emissions not taxed, industry has developed to be wasteful.
Youth leadership:
The current generation of leaders and decisionmakers are handing over a polluted world with rising carbon levels. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for the youth, who need to stand up and become the climate leaders of tomorrow.
Innovative climate financing:
Access to funding for climate-friendly projects is tough because financial institutions see things such as renewable projects as risky. This is changing, thanks to institutions providing innovative loaning mechanisms. Unlocking new financial models will help change the world.
Water efficiency and management:
South Africa’s biggest climate issue is with water; as the drought illustrated, there is little of the precious liquid and it needs to be conserved. Any project that saves water is ensuring water that can be used for development and consumption.
Women in climate:
Climate change disproportionately affects women, who have to spend more time on dangerous tasks such as collecting water from rivers. This category recognises projects that help women become more resilient, and play more of a role in shaping their own, sustainable, future.
Innovation in construction:
Most projects merely pay lip service to sustainability and climate issues, creating pseudo-green communities that do little to actually improve the environment. But a few nodes of excellence show other developers how projects can be done.
Community conservation and resilience:
The changing climate, with ever-increasing temperatures, means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for communities to continue with business as usual. This means all sorts of changes in how humanity works, from farmers changing how they irrigate to villages sharing resources to grow sustainably. This category looks at communities that are thinking out of the box to ensure their own survival.
Species conservation:
Climate change and an ever-growing human footprint are having devastating impacts on species, with the world hurtling towards another mass extinction event. This category recognises groups that are making huge sacrifices to ensure the survival of species in the face of relentless poaching and encroachment.