Plant-Based Campus Wins Sustainability Award at Karolinska Institutet

On 16 April, students at Plant-Based Campus Karolinska Institutet (PBC KI) have been awarded KI’s Sustainability Award 2026 (Student Award) for this year’s most innovative and impactful poster on sustainability and health. This year’s theme was “From plate to planet: how food shapes our health” and the competition aims to recognise students and doctoral students who have proposed or implemented innovative and significant projects at the intersection of sustainability and health.

During the event, PBC KI hosted a discussion table with the theme "Feeding Humanity: Industrial Agriculture and the Myth of Optimization", tackling how conventional large-scale farms compare with more sustainable farming methods in terms of efficiency, biodiversity impact, and effects on human health.

The jury announced the winners by saying:

“Plant-based Campus – Transforming food systems one campus at a time”. The project presents PBC, a student-led non-profit organisation that aims to accelerate a plant-based transition on campus. It embraces a practice-oriented initiative with a strong organizational model, scalability, and proven implementation. The poster design is balanced and visually accessible. Well done!”

Through this Award, Karolinska Institutet regonises PBC KI’s work to highlights the interconnection between food systems, human health and planetary health. Food system change is essential to combat the most common non-communicable diseases, and avoid diease and death due to climate change and other environmental crises. PBC KI is creating impactful change at the highest ranked medical university in the Nordics where future leaders, doctors, healthcare workers, and institutional actors are trained. By changing norms, PBC KI is creating future where plant-based food systems are seen as an essential lever to tackle negative impacts of of environmental and health challenges.

The PBC KI chapter started in September 2025 and has since organised community events and workshops that gathered hundreds of students and staff. The chapter has continues to collaborate the environmental office and student union, and organises educational outreach to contribute toward the vision of cheap, healthy, sustainable and 100% plant-based catering, to support the current “One Planet Plate” framework at the campus.

If you are a student or academic at Karolinska Institutet, you can get involved with the campaign here.

Plant-Based Campus is a democratic student-led campaign working with universities and higher education institutions to transition to 100% plant-based catering to address the climate and environmental crises. Plant-Based Campus is currently active at 14 universities across the Nordics.