The Samsø Award shines on

The Samsø Award is awarded through a process that gives the winning sustainability projects an even more shining and bright future.

The Samsø Award is aimed at forming a community, collecting best practices, showcasing exemplary projects and awarding a prize to a group of projects, which offer environmental, social and economic benefits to the community. As projects doing this all are worth recognizing and give a bright future the nominated were all announced as winners and given tools from experts to develop it further and disseminate it.

The Samsø Award was developed in the framework of the Development to Dissemination (D2D) project. The D2D project works towards clean and healthy future for the regions and communities in the North Sea region through the implementation of innovations inspired by sustainable innovation concepts. D2D is part of the EU Interreg Program and has partners from the Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Sweden, Germany and Belgium. The Samsø Award mechanism was developed by IIIEE at Lund University, in collaboration with Samsø Energy Academy and Aalborg University.

Purpose of the Samsø Award

The purpose of the Samsø award is not only to reward a community or group for what they have achieved in the past, but also to recognize the potential for promoting more sustainable communities in the future. In this sense, the objectives of the award are to:

• Identify, recognize and empower community-led ideas and projects that:
  • Stimulate a transition towards sustainability
  • Have a long-term vision and a focus on continuous improvement
  • Contribute to local development and/or good practices within the community, which encompasses social, economic and
  • environmental progress.
• Create a network of communities, in order to establish and foster an expanding system that facilitates the dissemination of knowledge and experiences. In that sense the Samsø Award is more a mechanism than a prize. It’s creating winners due to the network relations made in the progress and contacts in the workshop and the future life of the projects.

Why a “Samsø” Award?

The tangible achievements on Samsø are essential, but what makes Samsø unique is the passion and engagement demonstrated by the project leaders, along with the wider community. This not only explains the Samsø island’s success thus far, but also creates the conditions for it to continue into the future. It is this engagement and inspiration that we is recognized and rewarded in the scope of the Samsø Award.

The island of Samsø is an example of how communities can instigate change and lead the transition – in this case to a low carbon society.

And the winner is….

The international jury chose three projects to be winners fulfilling the criterias

• “Windpower as a development tool for life in the town of Hvide Sande”
• “Green Valley Flyinge”
• “Zero waste for the town of Tversted”

The wind power project from Ringkøbing-Skjern municipality in Denmark has a very high local involvement. The project is owned by a local foundation that ensures the development of the fishing village of Hvide Sande. The project has inspired other municipalities in Denmark. http://www.hvidesande.dk/hvide-sande/de-tre-vindmoeller-i-hvide-sande

Green Valley Flyinge is a green vision connecting local with global, rural with urban, research with practice and people with technology. The goal is to utilize excess energy in a loop/trail containing for example sustainable housing, fossil free energy, local food production in greenhouses, recycling, cleaner water, animal husbandry, etc. and thus create a sustainable trail where new products and services are developed and tested along. http://www.flyinge.nu/fu/fou.html

 Zero Waste Tversted demonstrates how local enthusiasts can move a society towards sustainable waste behaviour. The project resulted in a stronger awareness of recycling and preventing waste, much more recyclable materials collected, and 80 % more households refusing printed advertising. The project helped the beach village Tversted to brand itself and inspired other, larger towns to start similar projects.https://www.facebook.com/nulskrald?fref=photo

The Samsø Award committee is already in progress finding new projects to celebrate and help forward.

For more information contact

Søren Hermansen, Samsø Energy Academy

M: +45 21644391