Winner of the 2025 Nordic Council Environment Prize

The theme for this year’s Nordic Council Environment prize is Civil Society’s Green Contribution. An initiative to involve everybody in the green transition. Green Neighbourhood Communities are deeply rooted in local communities, fostered by people’s desire to cultivate fellowship with their neighbours through activities that promote sustainable living. These activities are genuinely grassroots and easy to engage in such as communal dinners, flea markets, or small-scale tree-planting projects to create greener surroundings. The community aspect adds a human element to collective efforts – it matters to you because it matters to your neighbour. 

The movement makes engaging in a more climate-friendly and sustainable lifestyle both easy and enjoyable. Within just a few years, the movement has grown to more than 300 Green Neighbourhood Community groups with more than 30,000 active participants in Denmark and now also in Norway and Germany. They call themselves “practivists, not activists”.

Green Neighbourhood Communities is a movement that can be adapted to any neighbourhood, since local residents set their own goals and determine what kind of community they want to create. 

Green Neighbourhood Communities initiated the annual “Climate Action Day”, which brought together 250,000 people from Denmark in 2025. The event creates pride, visibility, and a hope for collective action. According to an upcoming study by Quentin Gausset and Camilla Nielsen-Englyst at Copenhagen University, participants in Green Neighbourhood Communities have significantly reduced their CO2 emissions compared to the Danish population in general.

Both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis require broad public support. 
Green Neighbourhood Communities has demonstrated that engagement can be both fun and rewarding. The movement could strengthen environmental efforts across all the Nordic countries by activating citizens on a practical plane – ONE action and ONE community at a time.