Prince Albert II honors winners of Environmental Photography Awards in Monaco

Prince Albert II of Monaco put environmental photography’s current direction on display at the Promenade du Larvotto, personally congratulating the 2026 winners as 36 selected images were drawn from about 10,000 submissions worldwide. The strongest work in Monaco leaned toward threatened species, human pressure on ecosystems and clear visual storytelling, showing a competition that rewards urgency as much as craft.

Britta Jaschinski took the Grand Prize and the Changemakers category for Handprint on Sea Turtle, while Fernando Faciole won Humanity versus Nature with Born for the Ocean, Fated to the Flames. Arnaud Farré won the Forests category with Spirits of the Falls and also claimed the Students’ Choice Award for Up is Down. Henley Spiers won Ocean with Shearwater’s Dilemma, Vadim Makhorov took Polar Regions with The Gathering, and Doug Gimesy won the Public Award with Koalas are Dying for You to Slow Down. The five category winners each received a €1,000 cash prize, the Grand Prize carried a €5,000 grant, and the Public Award and Students’ Choice Award each received a €500 grant.

The pattern across the winning frames is hard to miss. These are not quiet landscape studies built on scenery alone; they are pictures that push viewers toward a subject and a consequence, whether that is a sea turtle, koalas under pressure, polar environments or fires meeting human activity. That emphasis fits the award’s structure, which splits the competition into Polar Regions, Forests, Ocean, Humanity versus Nature and Changemakers, categories designed to keep the environmental story broad while still demanding a strong narrative point of view. The Public Award drew more than 5,000 votes, a sign that the most accessible images were also the ones with the clearest stakes.

The 2026 edition carried extra weight for the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, which launched the Environmental Photography Award in 2021 and made it one of the three pillars of its Green Shift initiative. This year’s exhibition also marked the foundation’s 20th anniversary, with panels tracing two decades of work on environmental protection, biodiversity and planetary health. Sergio Pitamitz served as contest chairman, and the jury included Sharon Guynup, Florian Ledoux, Steve Winter and Christian Ziegler.

The Monaco presentation runs until 30 July 2026, and four photographs from the same edition are also on view at Monaco train station until September. With past exhibitions having traveled to Italy, San Marino, Spain, the United States, Canada and France, the award is building a circuit for the kind of environmental image that now gets rewarded: direct, species-focused and anchored in a story the viewer can read in a single frame.