The Sustainability Excellence Awards 2025: Emerald Advisory wins Best Upcoming Sustainable Consultancy award

Emerald Advisory’s mission is to address a systemic risk to the UAE green transition, by carbon foot-printing and decarbonizing Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) at scale.

SMEs in the UAE are a foundational engine of productivity – they are agile, resourceful, hard-working, and sustaining so many communities at home and beyond UAE borders. But they are also exposed to rapidly evolving global markets, demanding greener products and solutions. Current solutions do not work for them, so they risk losing relevance, which eventually will lead to growing inequalities and communities left behind. This is touching too many lives and a creative, powerful source of economic growth. As a system builder and problem-solver dedicated to growing our green ecosystems, I feel a responsibility to enable their transition. They deserve to be part of the success story.

My mission is to awaken all SMEs in the UAE to 2 fundamental truths about sustainability:

1. There is always a road to become sustainable, competitive and profitable, beyond compliance. Those who adapt today are set to win in tomorrow’s markets.

2. Sustainability is not a department in your organisation. It’s a way of thinking and operating, and if done right should drive strategies into innovation, create resilience, and opening opportunities in the green economy.

The systems I build are not those for the front page. But they are foundational and enabling, those for real value creation and long-term resilience. One of the most successful one was is the integration of sustainability and climate risk management into renewable energy assets. Success meant that we were able to create alignment and sustained performance between investment case, project design, and asset operations. We were exposed to climate risk and business interruption losses, which we reduced drastically through design adaptations,  risk mitigations and disaster preparedness to minimize losses, accelerate recovery, and adapt our risk transfer strategies. Cross-departments collaboration across the assets life-cycle proved essential to enable a significant enhancement to the company valuation. Everybody won then, and for the long run.

The most challenging aspect about what I do is having the right authority and sponsorship within the organisation. Over half of sustainability initiatives fail to deliver on the expected outcomes and performance - but this is actually also true for large projects. Building an effective, scalable, and robust system requires to rethink all the parts composing it. Meaning different business lines and departments within it, with their technology, their people, their processes, their governance, and everything in between them. This is where failure happens. And as far as sustainability is concerned, moving from a CSR practice to a sustainability-driven mindset requires widely broadening a concept from standing beside the business into making it part of it.

This is why, at Emerald Advisory, we always look at sustainability both as an enabler and a driver to your business strategy.  A sustainability initiative needs to be intimately tight to your strategic objectives. Otherwise you are missing the point of adapting your business to sustainable models, and rather than identifying where value can be created, you are just wasting time, money and efforts without the ability to really nail how, and to which extends, it supports your business. We demonstrate success with appropriate, measurable and baselined indicators, used to track performance and value creation.

The UAE strives  for sustainability excellence, and I reckon corporates can do a few important things to tag along and move things forward: 

·  SSGleaders can broaden their horizons into all fields of sustainability so they can design initiatives as systems, that percolate throughout instead of just landing on an isolated topic, ensuring alignment to the business strategy, and identifying opportunities for sustainable products, solutions, or investments.

·  All executives should keep themselves abreast about technology – from traditional SaaS solutions to AI-enabled forward-looking ones. Sustainability is enabled, as so many other practices, by technology -  don’t miss the train that has already left the station.

·  Executives should share, discuss, debate, advocate, inform, and train. Information is key and unfortunately still cruelly missing in so many organisations in the UAE - and this engagement is necessary to take to turn into the green economy.

- The writer, Audrey Macaluso Fages is Founder, Emerald Advisory