Environmental Photography Award crowns winners spotlighting nature's fragility
Britta Jaschinski's ultraviolet turtle forensic image took the 2026 Grand Prize as 10,000 entries showed conservation photography leaning into science-led storytelling.
The sharpest environmental photography now looks less like a postcard and more like evidence, and the Environmental Photography Award’s 2026 winners made that shift impossible to miss. Britta Jaschinski took the Grand Prize for Handprint on Sea Turtle, a forensic wildlife image that also won the Changemakers category, as the competition crowned seven prize-winning photographs from a shortlist of 36 drawn from roughly 10,000 entries.
The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation launched the award in 2021, and it has now reached its sixth edition as one of the three pillars of the Foundation’s Green Shift initiative. That scale matters because the final selection did not simply reward beautiful nature pictures. It highlighted work that used close framing, scientific process, and direct human traces to tell a harder story about ecological pressure, from anti-poaching forensics to road trauma, wildfire risk, and the strain on fragile ecosystems.
Jaschinski, a British-German wildlife photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Time Magazine and GEO, made the strongest case for that direction. Handprint on Sea Turtle documented forensic work that can reveal a human handprint on a turtle shell under ultraviolet light, turning a shell into a visual record of wildlife crime and the tools used to fight it. The Grand Prize carried a €5,000 grant, while the Changemakers category win added a €1,000 prize to the image’s standing as the contest’s clearest example of science-driven conservation storytelling.
The rest of the winners broadened that narrative across several different visual strategies. Arnaud Farré won Forests with Spirits of the Falls, photographed at Iguazú Falls in Argentina and Brazil in 2024, where 275 waterfalls stretch across nearly 3 kilometers. Farré also took the Student’s Choice Award for Up is Down. Fernando Faciole won Humanity versus Nature with Born for the Ocean, Fated to the Flames. Henley Spiers won Ocean with Shearwater’s Dilemma, and Vadim Makhorov won Polar Regions with The Gathering. Doug Gimesy won the Public Award for Koalas are Dying for You to Slow Down, a stark image of a koala killed by a vehicle strike in Australia in 2025 that drew more than 5,000 public votes from the 36-image shortlist.
The awards will be shown in Monaco from 27 May to 30 July 2026 before traveling internationally, with Sergio Pitamitz continuing as contest chairman. The strongest takeaway from this year’s results is clear: conservation photography is winning attention not just by showing nature at risk, but by finding fresher ways to show the fingerprints, fire lines, and forensic details behind that fragility.
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