🇪🇺 Art Competition for Climate Action 🎨 Make Invisible Methane Visible in the CH4rt Competition ♻️ (Win up to €1,000)

If you are a young creative who wants your art to do more than hang on a wall, this is your moment. The CH4rt Competition invites young artists across Europe to make one of climate change's most powerful and invisible forces, methane, impossible to ignore. With prizes of up to €1,000, a public exhibition in Brussels, and the chance to have your work selected by a Member of the European Parliament, this is a rare opportunity to turn creativity into real climate impact.

About the Competition

The CH4rt Competition invites young creatives across Europe to help make invisible methane emissions visible through art, illustration, digital creativity, and visual storytelling. It is organised by Environmental Defense Fund Europe as part of the Time For CH4nge campaign.

Methane is one of the most powerful, yet invisible, drivers of climate change, and this competition is on a mission to change that. Art can inspire and motivate climate action, and CH4rt is looking for bold, original work that makes methane feel immediate, real, and impossible to ignore.

Who Can Apply

🇪🇺 EU citizens aged 18 to 30

🎨 Creatives of all kinds, not just scientists or experts. You do not need technical or scientific knowledge to take part, only imagination and a willingness to be bold.

The Brief

The competition focuses on man-made methane from oil and gas production. To help spark ideas, the organisers have shared six creative prompts. You can use them as a starting point or go in a completely different direction and make the work entirely your own:

🐉 If methane was a creature, it would look like… a character representing something invisible, powerful, and overlooked, and how it might change once brought under control

🎨 If methane was visible, it would be the colour of… a visual language that reveals its presence, and what "no emission" might look like

🔧 If you could fix a methane leak, it would feel like… how a leak might look when exposed, and how repair, sealing, or prevention could be shown

📖 If methane told a story, it would start with… the full chain of action: finding, fixing, and stopping emissions in real time

🎭 If methane wore a disguise, it would dress up as… how it might try to blend into our environment, and the visual clues that uncover what is really there

🌍 If we had a world without methane leaks, it would look like… a place, system, or piece of infrastructure shown both with active emissions and once they are addressed

What They Are Looking For

The jury wants work that is bold, imaginative, and ambitious. They encourage you to:

✨ Be bold, imaginative, and ambitious

🖌️ Choose a medium that excites you, even if you have never used it before, because now is the time for courage and optimism

🚫 Avoid getting bogged down in technical details or scientific precision, since this is a creative challenge, not a technical exam

Your work can be literal, symbolic, abstract, or experimental. It could be an expressionist collage of methane molecules, an impressionist painting of methane as an animal or texture, a protest poster, or a photograph imagining methane as a person. There are no limits to what you can imagine, but because the focus is man-made methane from oil and gas production, please avoid making cows and waste the subject of your piece.

How It Will Be Judged

An expert panel scores every entry against four formal criteria. Pre-shortlisted entries then go to the full Jury, who convene to agree on the shortlist, finalists, overall winner, and runners-up. The four criteria are:

🏅 Artistic Quality: technical execution, craft, and visual impact

🧠 Conceptual Strength: how effectively the work engages with the brief

📣 Communicative Power: the ability to reach and resonate with a non-specialist audience

💡 Originality: the freshness and distinctiveness of the approach

The jury is looking for artistic quality, a strong response to the brief, originality and impact, and a positive message. There was also a recorded Q&A with the judges on 21 May 2026, available to watch on demand, where the jury discussed what they are looking for in submissions.

Prizes

Winning and shortlisted artworks will be displayed in a CH4rt exhibition in Brussels in September 2026.

🥇 €1,000 to the overall winner, including a cash prize, exhibition, and publication

🏛️ €1,000 MEP Prize, selected by MEP Lena Schilling

🥈 €500 to each of the two runners-up, including a cash prize, exhibition, and publication

Key Dates

📂 22 April 2026: entries open

⏰ 5 July 2026: entries close

📨 July 2026: finalists notified

🎉 September 2026: winners announced, with the exhibition and awards in Brussels

How to Apply

Upload a clear photograph or copy of your art piece as a JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or EPS file (maximum 20MB). Artworks can be drawn or painted with a range of materials, including collage, photo montage, illustration, or work designed on a computer.