Food For Thought Festival 2026: Sustainable Digitalisation and Digitalisation for Sustainability

We encounter digital solutions and devices at every point in our daily lives. At the same time, digital development is an important part (and often also result) of a great many scientific research and innovation projects. What effect are these digital solutions having on our planet and well-being, and what social changes are they bringing about? Do the digital and sustainable transitions complement or to some degree contradict each other? We will attempt to answer these and similar topical questions at the 2026 Food For Through Festival.

The aim of the festival events is to draw attention to the social and environmental challenges being posed by the development and use of new digital technologies, and also throw light upon how and under what conditions digital solutions may support a more sustainable future. 

This year’s festival will take place in March, as 14 March is also official “Digital Cleanup Day” at the Ecologists Without Borders organisation. Aware that our daily activities and digital habits help generate digital waste, the University of Ljubljana is also joining the Slovenian Digital Cleanup Campaign as part of this year’s Food For Thought festival.

We invite all University of Ljubljana students and staff to take part in the nationwide digital cleanup campaign, which will take place between 14 and 31 March. Together we can achieve the objective of cleaning up digital waste – waste that, because of its “intangible” nature, often remains invisible to or hidden from users, even though, in practice, it makes a measurable contribution to carbon footprint.

Our participation during the festival is a continuation of our established practice of reaching out to the wider environment in pursuit of the University of Ljubljana’s Sustainability Strategy 2025–2030, which highlights, among other things, the need to strengthen awareness of the importance of using natural resources and managing waste with care and with due regard to the environment. The festival also provides a platform for highlighting the topic of sustainable digital solutions, and for examining it critically within the context of various different areas of research.

The festival programme also features a number of free events, including the Science Slam and a central round-table discussion on the topic of sustainability and artificial intelligence (both events are open to the public), as well as a wide range of training events and practical workshops for University of Ljubljana students and staff. We were helped in our preparations for the festival by the Jožef Stefan Institute, the National Institute of Chemistry, Science on the Street and the University of Ljubljana Digital Centre, as well as the Ecologists Without Borders organisation.

At the festival, you will have the opportunity to:

• take part in discussions on the topic of mental health in the era of digitalisation as part of EUTOPIA_HEALTH Day;
• listen to talks by researchers on whether and under what conditions artificial intelligence can be developed and used in a way that serves the sustainable transformation of society;
• get behind the researchers taking part in the Science Slam, where we will examine how the two main visions of the future, digital and sustainable, can complement and support each other;
• begin cleaning up your digital devices and electronic mail boxes in support of the Slovenian Digital Cleanup Campaign;
• learn more about the increasingly important role of AI in medicine;
• find out more about how AI could help resolve sustainability-related challenges and, in the meantime,
• take a break from your screens in the name of well-being by taking part in workshops devoted to digital switch-off, all with the aim of raising awareness of the need for everyone to exercise some mental health self-care and take a balanced approach to digital technologies.