Climate Solutions

In the wake of the king tides that swamped San Rafael and Corte Madera in January, KQED interviewed Associate Professor Kristina Hill, an expert in sea level rise and climate adaptation. “We should be ready to live in a bathtub,” Hill said. “Then I think we’re in business and will have a way to live for a 100 years and preserve the city’s tax base.”

The Architect’s Newspaper says that the Chengdu Pavilion, a building in China’s Sichuan Province designed by Chair of Architecture Lisa Iwamoto’s firm IwamotoScott, “represents a trajectory toward environmentally adaptive architecture in anticipation of the context taking shape around it.”

Drawing on research developed by Paul Mayencourt’s team at the UC Berkeley Wood Lab, Mad River Mass Timber has emerged as California’s first producer of dowel-laminated mass timber, which has the potential to improve forest health, mitigate wildfire risk, and accelerate the production of affordable housing — while also contributing toward the long-term goal of decarbonizing the environment.

The Department of City & Regional Planning is pleased to welcome AJ Kim, associate professor of city planning in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University, as the 2026 Robert S. Cornish Chair of Regional Planning. A specialist in housing and community economic development, participatory methods, environmental justice, and health equity, Kim will co-teach a spring-semester graduate environmental justice studio, Toward Equitable Health Outcomes in Low-income Communities of Color, with Margaretta Lin.

Paul Mayencourt talks to Climate Break host Ethan Elkind about solar kilns as a low-energy alternative for drying lumber for construction.

This fall, UC Berkeley’s Master of Urban Design program is presenting The Challenge of Whole Earth Urbanism, a three-part symposium that aims to engage the entire College of Environmental Design community in a discussion of urbanism. 

Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design Kristina Hill, a leading expert on adapting cities to rising sea levels and groundwater due to climate change, was awarded the 2025 Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal. One of the foundation’s highest honors, this annual award recognizes a landscape architect for distinguished work over a career in applying the principles of sustainability to landscapes.

Kristina Hill, Institute of Urban & Regional Design Research Director and associate professor, alongside five Bay Area environmental justice organizations launches the Bay Area Community Air Quality Map, a new tool designed to provide real-time estimates of air quality across the Bay Area for students and their families.

In this 101 in 101 video, Professor of Architecture Ronald Rael gives a primer on earthen architecture and explains why our future homes could be made using the soil beneath our feet. Soil is a material so compelling that it has long been a central pillar of Rael’s work and teaching.

A new report from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation finds that some metro areas have outperformed national trends in building housing in walkable neighborhoods. Understanding what these cities have done may help others make similar progress.

For the first time, Berkeley teams came out on top in the 2025 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition. The theme for this year’s competition, which received entries from schools across the country, was “designing for disasters.”

Designer, educator, researcher, and alum David Brown (MArch 1990) led this year’s competition, with the theme Lot, Garden, and Void. Student teams of five to six students had 58 hours to create their designs before presenting to a panel of jurors. Brown, professor of architecture and director of the College of Architecture at the University of Illinois – Chicago, is best known for The Available City, his ongoing initiative to document, explore, and reimagine vacant lots in Chicago as landscapes of collective action.

The California Institute for Energy and Environment announced Aoyu Zou, a PhD student in architecture (BSTS), as the recipient of the 2025 Art Rosenfeld Award for Energy Efficiency. Working in the Center for the Built Environment under Professors Stefano Schiavon and Gail Brager, Zou is developing scalable, grid-interactive solutions to improve energy efficiency in the built environment.

CED announces Just Climate Futures grants to support projects that investigate carbon-neutral timber construction, new methods of wildfire risk mitigation, converting commercial buildings into affordable housing, and the environmental impacts of AI.

Metropolis has named Kyra Johnston (MArch 2025) to the Future100 class of 2025. Each year, a jury of experts designates the top graduating architecture and interior design students in the U.S. and Canada, nominated by their instructors and mentors.

A team of CED researchers affiliated with the Center for the Built Environment received the 2024 Best Paper award from the Building and Environment Journal. The paper, “Causal thinking: Uncovering hidden assumptions and interpretations of statistical analysis in building science,” was co-authored by CED’s Ruiji Sun, Stefano Schiavon, Gail Brager, Edward Arens, and Hui Zhang, with Thomas Parkinson and Chenlu Zhang.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Liz Gálvez’s ARCH 202 Collective Comfort studio earned a Tulane Prize honorable achievement for its cutting-edge curriculum relating to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

designboom explores Professor Ron Rael’s Adobe Oasis created for Desert X in California’s Coachella Valley: “Layered in rhythmic ribbons of red adobe, the walls mimic the texture of the surrounding palm trunks, anchoring the work in both its landscape and architectural heritage aligned with the 2025 exhibition’s call for interventions that reimagine the desert as a site of memory, transformation, and resistance.”

Over 10 summers, students impacted by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Tohoku  came to CED to develop strategies for recovery using the Y-PLAN framework.

“Getting In, Out, and About,” a report by Morgan Cunneen-Franco (MCP 2025), Lisa Schroer (MCP 2025), and Esteban Villaseñor (MCP 2025), analyzes the Berkeley Hills and recommends strategies to improve pedestrian safety, emergency vehicle access, and evacuation routes in the dense residential area.