ESG - What You Need to Know and What You Might Not Know with Dr. Waddah Ghanem

“It sounds like a food additive, or at least thats the look I get when I ask some people about it” he said. I was talking with Dr. Ghanem about governance - at the board level and the conversation naturally turned towards ESG. “Some parts of it don’t really concern the safety professional, like whether the company engages in bribery practices, but other parts do. The environment part is obvious, if you have HSE or EHS in your title, but some of the social is more than just traditional health and safety.”

The net result of the conversation was that we both decided that there were probably a lot of questions that HSE professionals would like to ask about ESG, so we decided to do the show. 

About our guest:
Dr. Waddah S. Ghanem Al Hashmi
BEng (Hons), MBA, MSc, DipSM, DipEM, AFIChemE, FEI, FIEMA, MIoD, F.GCCBDI
Global Health and Safety Governance and Leadership Expert
Chairman, Federal Occupational Health & Safety Committee, ESMA, United Arab Emirates
Hon. Chairman, Energy Institute - Middle East
Chairman, Professional Engineering Chapter – UAE Society of Engineers

"Towards Understanding better; Environment, Social and Governance Factors..."

The HSE practitioner is expected more and more to multi-task and understand so many more and new things as the developments in the corporate world change rapidly. 

In this episode Dr Waddah Ghanem Al Hashmi will give a brief overview of ESG to introduce this subject of fast-growing importance in the industry. From large corporates to start-ups and small companies, ESG indicators, voluntary and integrated reporting has become an important thing to understand. Many of the indicators that should be reported in live integrated and sustainability reports come from various integrated EHS key performance indicators.

Waddah is considered one of the global authorities on governance and leadership in EHS. Waddah holds several academic and vocational qualifications including a Degree in Engineering, two Post Graduate Diplomas from the UK an MSc in Environmental Sciences from UAE University, an Executive MBA and a Doctorate from the University of Bradford in the UK and specialises in Corporate Governance and Leadership. He has received several awards in his career, most notably, the Rashid Prize for Scholarship Excellence in 2007 (Dubai), and the IEMA Sustainability Leader of the Year (UK) in 2019.

Waddah has worked for the ENOC Group as EHSQ Director, Executive Director EHSSQ & Corporate Affairs and then Senior Director – Sustainability, Operational & Business Excellence. He had spent the last 24 years from being a consultant to an EHS Supervisor at the refinery to assistant EHS Advisor in the Group, later to grow the EHS Compliance function until he become Director, EHSQ Compliance. He now works in Marine Assurance and Logistics.