Instituto de Ciencias Agroindustriales y del Medio Ambiente (ICAM) - Colombia

Thirty-three years ago, Jose Rafael Rincón M. and his wife founded the Fundación Bios Terrae ICAM (Instituto de Ciencias Agroindustriales y del Medio Ambiente) in Ubaté, Cundinamarca, with a radical vision: deliver world-class education to Colombia's historically underserved rural youth, and turn financial scarcity into pedagogical strength. Rather than seeing limited budgets as a constraint, they reframed the school as a living, open-air laboratory, a place where students don't just study environmental science, they practice it on the land that feeds Bogotá.

Ubaté is known as Colombia's dairy capital, supplying up to 25% of the basic food basket consumed by the eight-million-strong capital city. But between 2010 and 2011, the region suffered one of the worst winters in 70 years, with La Niña flooding one million hectares nationwide and causing US$5 billion in losses. El Niño then brought a devastating drought that wiped out roughly half of local livestock activity, pushing rural families into poverty and migration. ICAM responded by positioning itself as the region's front line of climate adaptation.

That vision has attracted a remarkable portfolio of international recognition. In 2012, the Embassy of Japan financed a new agro-ecological training centre at the school with a grant of over COP $180 million under its Human Security Grassroots programme, benefiting approximately 13,320 people across the region. In 2013, ICAM took second place in the General Category of Colombia's National Ecology Prize "Planeta Azul," awarded by Banco de Occidente for its collective construction of the largest open-air environmental education laboratory in the Ubaté region. In 2017, the UN Environment Programme chose ICAM as the site of its fourth MEbA demonstration plot in the Andean region, implementing 11 ecosystem-based adaptation measures, from silvopastoral systems to solar dehydrators, and training 600 farmers in the first year alone, with microcredit access through Bancamía.

The crowning achievement came in January 2023, when ICAM was named winner of the Zayed Sustainability Prize in the Global High Schools category for the Americas region, receiving up to USD $100,000 at the 14th awards ceremony during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. The winning project, a Community Air Quality Programme, aims to improve the health of 200,000 residents in Ubaté, train 50 teachers and up to 5,000 students as community air-quality monitors, reforest five hectares of páramo ecosystems, and transform a former mine into a solar-powered sustainable farm. Months later, the Municipal Council of Villa de San Diego de Ubaté formally recognised the school through Municipal Agreement 03 of 2015, honouring its contribution to environmental protection, education, and the international prestige it brought to the municipality.

What makes ICAM compelling is the through-line: a small rural school that refused to accept that world-class environmental leadership belonged to wealthy institutions. Students like Sandy Vargas and Linda Bernal now stand on global stages, articulating sustainability as "the balance between social, economic, and environmental dimensions", and proving that Colombia's countryside can lead the world.