KARACHI, May 7: The Pakistan Environmental Reporting Awards for industrial units were launched at a local hotel on Tuesday.

Two NGOs — Worldwide Fund for Nature Pakistan (WWF) and Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (ACCA) — who have instituted the awards, urged the industrial units to submit their entries by Sept 30, 2002.

They said that entries would be scrutinized by a panel of judges by Dec 31, 2002, and the awards to the winning companies would be distributed in Feb 2003.

They said that business houses issued their companies’ financial reports every year, but now the time had come that the companies informed the people what they were doing in the field of environmental protection and how they planned to further improve and make their operations environment-friendly.

WWF Director-General, Ali Hassan Habib, said that this scheme would not only increase environmental awareness in the corporate sector, but also improve environmental performance of companies and industrial concerns enhancing their corporate reputation as green citizens.

He said that it would also provide corporations with an excellent opportunity to communicate their sense of responsibility towards the environment, by publicly disclosing their environment-friendly policies, targets and long-term objectives.

The UK-based technical director of ACCA, Roger Adams, said that now the global trend was towards greater disclosure of corporate environmental impacts, compliance and performance.

He said that global investors were increasingly regarding good environmental management as an integral element of overall governance and accountability. He said that similar awards were being given in many countries around the globe such as Europe, Asia, America, etc, and such awards would also be instituted in Malaysia and Singapore later this year.

Paola Lanzarini of Lead International, Arif Masood Mirza of ACCA, Azheruddin Khan of National Environmental Consultants and others also spoke.