A global research initiative co-led by Geoff Boeing, Associate Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, has won a prestigious Nobel Sustainability Trust (NST) Sustainability Award.
The winning project – the Global Observatory for Healthy and Sustainable Cities (GOHSC) – helps cities around the world measure their progress toward becoming healthier and more sustainable. Launched in 2022, the network now includes 319 researchers and policy practitioners from 198 cities in 57 countries.
“It’s thrilling to win this award because it amplifies our message of how evidence-informed planning can make our cities healthier, happier, more sustainable places to live,” said Boeing, who is also a faculty affiliate of the Spatial Sciences Institute at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The NST’s Sustainability Awards honor individuals, organizations, and companies whose achievements advance the innovation, promotion, and implementation of sustainable solutions. Boeing’s GOHSC initiative received the award for “Outstanding Research and Development for Intelligent and Sustainable Urban Solutions.”
“We are proud to highlight achievements that inspire the world to act with urgency and responsibility,” NST Chairman Peter Nobel said in a statement. “I warmly congratulate the award winners and thank them for their outstanding contributions. Their efforts are paving the way toward a future in which humanity can prosper in harmony with the planet.”
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Find Out MoreThe GOHSC’s flagship initiative – the 1,000 Cities Challenge – provides open access tools that help local policymakers generate reports and scorecards to assess whether their cities are moving in the right direction to improve health and reduce factors contributing to climate change. For example, the tools can measure a city’s walkability, access to healthy food, public transportation, and urban heat vulnerability, among other factors.
“What makes this project different is that it truly is a global team effort,” Boeing said. “We’re not just academics calculating things in the ivory tower. We work hands-on with local collaborators in each of these cities to ground-truth the data, identify and analyze local policies, and interpret the results with sensitivity to the local context.”
Boeing and his colleagues published a series of articles in The Lancet Global Health about their work. The NST award is the latest recognition for the project, which also won the 2022 Planning Institute of Australia Victoria Award for Planning Excellence and the 2023 Planning Institute of Australia National Award for Planning Research Excellence. The project also won the 2024 USC Price High Impact Research Award and was selected to be USC’s university-wide submission for the Frontiers Planet Prize.
The award will be presented at the Nobel Sustainability Trust Summit, which will take place on Dec. 5 in Miami. The team will share up to 1.3 million Swedish kronor ($138,106) with two other 2025 Nobel Sustainability Trust award recipients.
