SEC Honors Globe for Sustainability Model

In an era when “ESG” is too often reduced to a checklist, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to honor Maria Yolanda Crisanto with the 2025 Private Sector Sustainability Champion Award lands with uncommon clarity.

Crisanto’s leadership resists the narrowness of carbon accounting alone. Her sustainability lens has always been wider—anchored in people as much as the planet. (Photos: Globe Telecom)

It is a recognition not of optics, but of architecture—the patient, inside-the-balance-sheet work of making purpose durable.

The award, conferred under the SEC’s Gender and Development honors, underscores a shift now unmistakable in Philippine corporate life: sustainability has moved from the margins to the core of how value is created, measured, and protected.

Few leaders embody that shift as fully as Crisanto, Globe Telecom’s Chief Sustainability and Corporate Communications Officer.

At Globe Telecom, sustainability was not treated as a parallel track. Under Crisanto’s stewardship, it was embedded—starting in 2020—into the company’s Balanced Scorecard, hardwiring ESG metrics into performance targets and policy commitments.

The award underscores a shift now unmistakable in Philippine corporate life: sustainability has moved from the margins to the core of how value is created, measured, and protected.

That decision matters. It signals to management and markets alike that sustainability is not an annual-report flourish but a long-term operating system. The results speak with unusual force.

Globe became the first publicly listed company in the Philippines to secure validated net-zero targets through the Science Based Targets initiative, earning recognition as a Faster Forward participant in climate action under the UN Global Compact, which Globe joined in 2019.

In a region where ambition often outruns verification, that distinction places Globe in rare company.

Yet Crisanto’s leadership resists the narrowness of carbon accounting alone. Her sustainability lens has always been wider—anchored in people as much as the planet.

Three years ago, she helped launch the Hapag Movement, a private-sector response to involuntary hunger that has since supported more than 120,000 Filipino families.

Earlier still, the Digital Thumbprint Program—introduced in 2016—quietly became one of the country’s most consequential digital literacy initiatives.

By 2025, it had equipped 11,600 students in a single year with essential online safety and digital skills, eventually earning adoption into the K–12 curriculum of the Department of Education.

Global benchmarks followed. Globe holds an AA rating from MSCI ESG Research, earned a CDP A score for Supplier Engagement and a B score for Climate in the 2024 cycle, and has remained part of the FTSE4Good Index Series for a decade.

In 2025, Globe was named among TIME and Statista’s Most Sustainable Companies—recognitions that are increasingly difficult to earn and harder to keep.

Crisanto herself is quick to deflect the spotlight.

“This award is shared with the entire Globe community,” she said, emphasizing collective stewardship over personal acclaim.

Her framing is instructive. ESG, she argues, has evolved beyond box-ticking; it is about innovation that endures—solutions that remain viable long after any one leader steps aside.

Climate risk, inequality, and digital exclusion, she reminds us, are not abstract futures but present pressures demanding systemic response.

That, perhaps, is the quiet lesson of this recognition. Sustainability leadership is no longer about being loud; it is about being legible—to investors, employees, communities, and the future.

By positioning digital infrastructure as a force for inclusive, sustainable progress, Globe has aligned itself with a national agenda that prizes innovation with purpose.

In honoring Yoly Crisanto, the SEC is also signaling what the next chapter of Philippine enterprise leadership should look like: principled, measurable, and built to last.

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