Open call for Climate Change Curriculum Prize

The Center on Climate Change and Urbanism (CCU) at Tulane University School of Architecture and Built Environment announces its 2025-2026 Tulane Prize for Climate Change Curriculum in the Built Environment to recognize innovative course development by faculty across the world.

Nominations for innovative curricula related to climate change in the built environment are being accepted until February 27, 2026, with 10,000 USD in awards available for selected winners. Qualified entries will be posted climatesyllabus.org, which provides a comprehensive searchable repository for course, studio, and seminar syllabi in urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, building science, real estate development, preservation, and urban policy. Last year’s prize winners and honorees represented ten projects from 11 international institutions. 

The CCU was established to advance a more holistic understanding of the role of the built environment in causing, mitigating, and adapting to climate change. In addition to the prize and syllabus bank, the CCU supports research among faculty and students and drives public programming on how climate change is shaping the Gulf Coast, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Tulane University School of Architecture and Built Environment will serve as the host institution for the international climate conference, Multiplied Displacements: The Climate-Housing Nexus, in January 2026. The conference is jointly hosted by University of Toronto School of Cities, Boston University Initiative on Cities, and Tulane's CCU.

“We recognize that climate change is an opportunity to redesign our built environment in a manner that advances affordability, accessibility and environmental sustainability, while also breaking down barriers to segregation, isolation, and carbon-intensive ways of life that have constrained our quality of life,” said Jesse M. Keenan, the center's Director and author of the book, North: The Future The Future of Post-Climate America (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Keenan, the School of Architecture’s Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning, emphasized the importance of everything from measuring the carbon footprint of each building to evaluating physical risks in urban planning projects.

“By bridging teaching and research in climate change, we are preparing our students with the cutting-edge skills that they need to address some of our planet's most pressing social and environmental challenges,” he said.

One of the center's initial supported projects includes the "Carbon Budget Zero" studio led by Assistant Professor Sonsoles Vela Navarro, which focuses on designing low-carbon housing and infrastructure in Florida, New York, and California. By targeting these diverse regions, there’s opportunity to explore new ways of retrofitting existing buildings in New York to improve energy efficiency while simultaneously looking at water conservation solutions in California or the use of solar energy in Florida.

Adam Marcus, the CCU’s Research Director and Associate Professor of Architecture, highlighted the critical mass of scholars at Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment already engaged in innovative approaches addressing climate change and plans for more.

“The School of Architecture and Built Environment and CCU are uniquely positioned to support and lead new interdisciplinary collaborations for engaging these challenges in novel and critical ways,” Marcus said.

Catherine Sckerl, CCU’s Managing Director and Professor of Practice in Architecture, will build the center’s infrastructure to support student and faculty research projects and field-based research studios, to deliver programming and events that promote cross-disciplinary dialogue and knowledge-sharing, and to facilitate intra- and inter-institutional initiatives.

“The impacts of climate change are accelerating, and every community is impacted,” Sckerl said. “We can’t continue to ignore it or be passive about including climate adaptations and mitigations in our work. It must be front and center.”

For more information about the Tulane Prize for Climate Change Curriculum in the Built Environment, visit here.