For its ‘Green Library for Green Croatia’ program, the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) has been awarded the 2023 Energy Globe Award at the national level. The Energy Globe Award was established in 1999 by Austrian advocate of energy efficiency, Wolfgang Neumann. Since 2008, it has been administered by the Energy Globe Foundation, based in Austria.
This prestigious prize was presented to Dr. Ivanka Stričević, the Director General of NSK, during the award ceremony held on October 17, 2023, at the Oris House of Architecture in Zagreb.
NSK initiated its ‘Green Library for Green Croatia’ program in 2016 and notably received the Energy Globe Award less than a month before ‘Let’s Go Green! 2023,’ the second edition of the Library’s international green libraries conference. Launched in 2018 as the world’s first international green libraries conference, the event brought together professionals from over 20 countries and successfully showcased green initiatives from libraries around the world.
Since 2022, the ‘Green Library for Green Croatia’ program also aims to raise awareness of the importance of achieving sustainable development through citizen science initiatives, targeting librarians, library users, and the wider public equally. Furthermore, it systematically advocates for the growing need to adopt sustainable daily habits, using stimulating messages that are promoted in all areas frequented by Library users and staff, as well as the content it publishes on the Library’s pages and profiles on social media platforms. In 2022, the Library also adopted guidelines for energy savings, whose implementation, in cooperation with NSK users, resulted in a 25% reduction in heating energy consumption and a 15% reduction in electricity consumption during the first seven months.
The program’s latest activity is the ‘Libraries and Sustainable Development: Strengthening NSK Capacities’ project, which the Library launched in 2023 with the support of the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media.
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