Of the 89 finalists from 63 countries across eight categories at this year’s Green Gown Awards, MOME took first place in the Nature Positive category. The 16-member international judging panel included experts from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UN SDSN), and the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI). 

According to the international jury, one of the programmes’ greatest strengths is that the individual initiatives do not operate in isolation but build on and reinforce one another to form a coherent whole. The judges particularly praised their innovative, holistic approach, which opens up new opportunities for MOME itself while offering other higher education institutions an inspiring model that they can adapt and develop further. 

From carbon neutrality to nature positivity 

MOME Zero, the university’s sustainability programme, was launched in 2022 with the aim of making MOME Hungary’s first carbon-neutral university by 2030. Since then, the initiative has grown far beyond its original ambition. Alongside reducing and offsetting emissions, the programme now encompasses urban biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation, and the conscious shaping of the university’s surroundings. 

Rather than treating sustainability as a series of one-off campaigns, the programme seeks to make it an integral part of how the university operates and thinks, through activities that actively involve both students and staff. The programme is built around five key areas: forest planting, beekeeping, composting, a community garden, and a waste bank. Aligned with the European Union’s GreenComp sustainability competence framework, these activities help foster students’ ecological awareness and agency. 

Over the past few years, the MOME Zero team has planted a total of 116,000 saplings, including replacements, across 25 hectares, with 690 students and staff taking part. The campus’s 450-square-metre community garden is home to nearly 50 climate-resilient species and 10 experimental plots, while its apiary houses around 300,000 bees. A six-cubic-metre experimental composting facility keeps green waste from the campus park on site, while the waste bank reduces the amount of new materials used in student projects by approximately 100 kilograms each year. 

When the campus becomes a learning environment  

The university’s real-world environmental challenges are turned into opportunities for learning and design, allowing students to contribute to making the campus more sustainable. This approach is central to the Ecology to Design (E2D) programme, which explores the relationship between nature, ecological systems, and design. Working with real-life situations, students explore issues relating to sustainable practices and develop creative design responses. In this way, the university itself becomes a sort of living laboratory.  

A collective effort, international acclaim 

Winning the Green Gown Award is a collective achievement. Staff, faculty members, and students from across the university worked together to achieve the goals of MOME Zero and bring the Ecology to Design course to life, creating a holistic programme. Dániel Barcza, Szilvia Weisz, Lívia Dávid, Éva Tornyánszki, Anetta Timár and Péter Pozsár played particularly important roles in the implementation of the project. 

The award marks an important milestone in MOME’s sustainability efforts, but it is not the end of the journey – rather, another step along the way. It affirms the belief that design can do more than respond to environmental challenges: it can actively drive change. The goal is to embed the nature-positive approach more deeply in the university’s operations, educational programmes, and community initiatives, while continuing to use design to address the ecological challenges of the future. 

More information: 

Green Gown Awards: Green Gown Awards: MOME – Nature Positive category 

MOME Zero Sustainability Action Programme 2026 

About MOME Zero 

Developed jointly by the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and the Foundation for Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, MOME Zero actively supports climate action and biodiversity conservation projects both on and off the campus, promotes comprehensive education in sustainability and ecology, and encourages sustainability-related research and grant applications. 

MOME aims to pioneer sustainable practices in Hungarian art higher education. As part of this effort, the university coordinates and continually develops its sustainability initiatives across education, research, and institutional operations, with the goal of making the green transition an increasingly central consideration in all areas of university life. 

Alongside its climate action ambitions, MOME places particular emphasis on reducing waste on campus, promoting green mobility, improving energy efficiency, and adapting the campus park to climate change while enhancing its biodiversity. At the same time, the university fosters ecological awareness among students and staff, empowering them to take action through new teaching modules, community initiatives, and programmes that encourage active participation. 

Subpage: https://mome.hu/en/zero 

Press contact: Brand Office: press@mome.hu