2025 prize winner

Adelheid Meier (2025): “From Me to We – Living Happily Together in a Sustainable Way”

The 2025 Sustainability Prize for innovative and practice-oriented theses in the field of sustainability went to Adelheid Maier. In her Master's thesis, she succeeded in convincingly bringing together two complex strands of theory, the concept of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and action-theoretical models of well-being from the field of positive psychology, in their interrelationship. Based on this, she designed the new ESD program “From Me to We – Living Happily Together in a Sustainable Way” for the Eichstätt Environmental Youth Hostel for school classes from the fifth grade onwards.

The multi-stage, systematic program evaluation, which followed a mixed-methods approach, attested to the diverse and high relevance of the new ESD offering. Away from the performance-oriented school routine, it opens up important spaces for children and young people to have experiences that strengthen their personalities, shape their values, and promote community in the sensitive phase of their identity development. In the process, valuable key competencies such as self-awareness, reflection, communication, and cooperation skills, as well as relevant psychological resources such as mindfulness, the ability to enjoy life, self-efficacy, and solidarity, are intensively developed and further refined. These promote both the subjective well-being and resilience of adolescents and a sustainable lifestyle. Teachers also benefit from the ideas provided by the happiness program, as these can be transferred into everyday school life in a sustainable manner. Against the backdrop of diverse social challenges, the new ESD concept opens up present- and future-oriented, sustainable options for action for young people, which can make a significant contribution to the socio-ecological transformation process.

2024 prize winner

Florian Hartwich (2024): “Soil analysis and accompanying hydrological investigations to assess the condition of peat in a lowland moor area in the Nassenfelser Schuttertal valley”

The sustainable use of organic moor soils is particularly important in light of climate protection targets. The transformation from the historically developed agricultural and forestry use of moors and the resulting drainage efforts to the adapted maintenance and restoration of a functional peat body and moor water balance must be designed in a sustainable manner. This is necessary in order to restore the ability of an already degenerated moor to bind carbon dioxide.

In his Master's thesis, “Soil analysis and accompanying hydrological investigations to assess the condition of peat in a lowland moor area in the Nassenfelser Schuttertal,” Florian Hartwich presents and evaluates the current condition of a lowland moor west of Nassenfels. The focus of the investigations carried out is therefore on the evaluation of field observations of borehole profiles, their laboratory analysis and comparison with hydrological measurement results and digital terrain data. The thesis was supervised by Dr. Peter Fischer, head of the Department of Soil Geography and Soil Erosion at the Faculty of Mathematics and Geography.

A further overview of the award winners from previous years can be found on the University prizes website.