🇦🇹Austria

Vorarlberg's state-owned utility runs an Alpine hydropower fleet that keeps the region's electricity fully renewable, and is building Austria's largest pumped-storage plant to help balance Europe's grid.

Since six activists founded it in 1982, GLOBAL 2000 has turned public petitions into Austrian law, from a landmark 1997 anti-GMO referendum to the country's 2011 climate protection act.

Since Austria's first national park here gave way to a UNESCO biosphere reserve, the Carinthian Nockberge have shown that centuries-old alpine farming and rare grassland biodiversity can thrive side by side.

Founded as the Wiener Tafel in 1999, this volunteer-run network now rescues up to four tons of surplus food a day for people in need across every Austrian province.

Amazone runs Vorarlberg's dedicated girls' center and free counseling line for girls, young women and gender-diverse youth aged 10 to 25, at a time when demand for support keeps climbing.

A grassroots Styrian association built one of Europe's first voluntary carbon-certificate markets that pays farmers directly for every tonne of CO2 they lock back into their soil.

Between Vienna and Bratislava, engineers and ecologists are reconnecting cut-off side-arms of the Danube to bring Central Europe's last great river floodplain back to life.

neunerhaus gives Vienna's homeless a home first, then the healthcare, jobs training and vet care for their pets that make staying housed possible.

Started by the Vienna Concert Hall, the Vienna Boys' Choir and Caritas Vienna in 2009, Superar gives children who couldn't otherwise afford it free, intensive orchestra and choir training.

A national umbrella group of Austrian repair cafes and reuse shops is proving that fixing things instead of binning them can create real jobs, not just save the planet.

In Linz's Haus der Menschenrechte, SOS-Menschenrechte houses unaccompanied refugee minors and asylum seekers while running Stand Up! workshops that take human-rights education into Austrian classrooms.

Since 1995, Hemayat has offered free interpreter-supported psychotherapy in Vienna to survivors of torture and war, one of the few services of its kind in Austria.

A breeding station outside Vienna has helped return Europe's largest bird of prey to the Alpine skies it vanished from a century ago.

Sindbad pairs socioeconomically disadvantaged Austrian teenagers with trained young-adult mentors for up to a year to help them cross the finish line into an apprenticeship or further schooling.

In the mountains between Lower Austria and Styria, roughly 460 hectares of forest have never known a chainsaw, forming the largest primeval-forest remnant left in the Alps.

Since the 1997 European Year Against Racism, fairplay has used football pitches across Austria as classrooms for fighting racism, sexism and discrimination in sport.