Playing for the Planet Alliance honored by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards

By GRID-Arendal

April 30^th, 2020

The Playing for the Planet Alliance – co-founded by GRID-Arendal, the UN Environment Programme and Playmob – has been named as a finalist in the 2020 World Changing Ideas Awards from the influential US business magazine Fast Company. The alliance was selected from among more than 3,000 entries to the awards, which honor projects, businesses, policies and concepts that are flattening the curve on the climate crisis, social injustice and economic inequality.

Playing for the Planet Alliance honored by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards

The Playing for the Planet Alliance brings together video game companies to make formal, quantitative commitments to harness the power of their platforms to combat the climate crisis. Outcomes include reductions in companies’ energy use, emissions and other environmental impacts of gaming, as well as catalyzing players to take action. Member companies of the Playing for the Planet Alliance – which include Microsoft, Google Stadia and Sony Interactive Entertainment – have a combined reach of more than one billion video gamers around the globe.

The collaborative nature of the Playing for the Planet Alliance stands out in the otherwise competitive tech sector, and demonstrates a new model for companies to create world-changing impact beyond standard Corporate Social Responsibility metrics or reporting. The alliance’s combined impact is greater than what the companies could achieve on their own. This could be a model for other sectors, enabling them to collaborate toward more innovation and more effective data sharing and problem-solving to confront urgent global challenges.

The Playing for the Planet Alliance was formally launched at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City in September 2019.

“The Playing for the Planet Alliance is still in its first year, but has already been cited by numerous CEOs as the impetus for bold, new, publicly declared climate commitments and the acceleration of other sustainability actions”, says GRID-Arendal Senior Economist Trista Patterson, author of the influential “Playing for the Planet” report that ultimately led to the creation of the alliance. “The urgency of challenges facing people and planet requires us to ‘level up’ our ability to collaborate across otherwise very competitive landscapes, as well as across the public/private divide.”

Fast Company’s panel of judges reviewed the thousands of award entries and chose those that have great potential to make impact. “There seems no better time to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, resources and, in some cases, their scale to tackle society’s biggest problems”, says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have uncovered some of the smartest and most inspiring projects of the year.”