UTAH, September 25 — Build Up Nepal has won the $250,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize for 2025 for replacing polluting coal-fired bricks with eco-friendly ones while making safe housing affordable for poor communities in Nepal, the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy at the University of Utah announced today.
The interlocking Compressed Stabilised Earth Bricks pioneered by Build Up Nepal can be made using locally available materials, with minimal cement and they are compressed, not fired.
The annual Wilkes Climate Launch Prize was established to accelerate worldwide progress and encourage technological advances for combating climate change. The 2025 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize received over 1,100 submissions worldwide, more than five times the number received in 2024.
Build up Nepal was selected from among six finalists that presented their ideas at the 2025 Wilkes Climate Summit in May. The finalists were evaluated by a team of independent expert judges for scalable impact, feasibility and potential for co-benefits to communities, economies or ecosystems. The runners-up for the prize are Roca Water, a company in Alameda, California, and De Novo Foodlabs, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Build up Nepal’s eco-brick technology is empowering poor families in Nepal to rebuild their homes after a series of earthquakes in 2015, and again in 2023, caused widespread damage and impoverishment. Their building technology uses a process that is far less polluting than conventional building techniques and provides a model approach that local construction entrepreneurs can adopt across the world.
Björn Söderberg, co-founder of Build up Nepal, visited the U this week to accept the award. Söderberg said Nepal is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, but until recently, poor families could not afford disaster-resilient homes, most of which are built with bricks. The coal-fired brick industry is responsible for 37% of CO2 emissions from combustion in Nepal, on top of dangerous air pollution and poor working conditions. Build up Nepal trains local entrepreneurs to make climate-friendly eco-bricks, build safe, affordable homes and create jobs in low-income communities.
According to Söderberg, their sustainable construction methods gained trust two years ago after another earthquake struck Nepal.
“When 90% of the buildings at the epicenter fell down, ours stood tall,” said Söderberg. “We believe this is the time to really introduce better, stronger, cheaper technology, not only to this place [that suffered earthquake damage] but demonstrating that this can become the standard for low-cost construction in all of Nepal.”
