Steward Leadership 25 awards honour firms that turn social, environmental challenges into growth
Five years of Steward Leadership 25 show business impact reaching ever more communities.
The Steward Leadership 25 (SL25) awards, now in its fifth year, honor 25 companies from Asia and the Pacific that have turned social and environmental challenges into profitable growth. The annual award, curated by the Steward Leadership Institute, Insead Hoffmann Institute, WTW, and The Straits Times, recognizes projects that demonstrate steward leadership and achieve growth while addressing environmental and social challenges.
The winners hail from 27 impact geographies, ranging from Mongolia and Japan to Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Iraq, reflecting a significant expansion from the first cohort in 2022, which was primarily concentrated in Southeast Asia. The SL25 awards recognize projects in five impact focus areas: climate and nature, waste and circularity, empowering communities, health, and digital well-being and access.
Climate and nature has consistently been the largest category, with nine to ten winners each year, while projects focused on waste and circularity have grown from two in 2022 to five in 2025. The awards also highlight the increasing role of technology in addressing these challenges, with over half of the 2025 winners describing their projects as technology-based.
The SL25 awards reflect a growing shift in how businesses in the region view challenges such as climate change, viewing them not just as risks but also as opportunities to build profitable enterprises around cleaner energy, less waste, and more resilient communities.
Brief written by urgent.news from Straits Times Business's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
