The Nobel Sustainability Trust has announced that our team has won the 2025 Nobel Sustainability Award for “outstanding research and development for intelligent and sustainable urban solutions” for our Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC).

Urban sustainability is key to planetary health. Yet few cities have measurable policy standards and targets to actually build healthier and more sustainable cities, and their health-supportive built environment features are often inadequate or inequitably distributed. Can residents sustainably access their daily living needs? A critical step toward making cities healthier and more sustainable is to empower policymakers and urban planners to consistently measure neighborhood-level spatial indicators of the built environment.

At GOHSC, we measure spatial and policy indicators of healthy and sustainable urban planning practice in partnership with a network of local collaborators in cities around the world. Our analytics let non-technical users load and transform their own local data to automatically calculate a set of indicators and generate a report and scorecard infographic for advocacy work. Over the past year, local planners, mayors’ offices, citizen advocates, and international organizations have used this software to measure, benchmark, and monitor cities’ progress toward global health and sustainability goals. This supports evidence-informed interventions anywhere from the neighborhood scale to the metropolitan scale. Our software’s accessibility and rigor unlock the ability to effect urgently needed change while reducing longstanding barriers to participation, particularly in under-resourced cities and countries where better planning for health and sustainability are most needed.

I’m really proud of this group. I’ve had the pleasure of serving on our executive committee and as the spatial team co-lead since its inception. We’re a member organization of the UN’s Global Urban Observatory Network and we published a series of articles in The Lancet Global Health a couple years ago about our work to date.

Sincere thanks to the hundreds of researchers and practitioners in hundreds of cities around the world who have joined our collaboration network over the past few years. And thank you to my colleagues on the executive committee: it is truly a pleasure working with you.