UCLA’s Pritzker Award Looks to the Future of Environmental Innovation

For Southern California communities, the arrival of fall has brought little relief from a summer that refuses to loosen its grip. Instead, the region has spent the past week sweltering through triple-digit temperatures, with downtown Los Angeles breaking heat records and unusually warm nights offering little reprieve. The season has become harder to separate from the environmental questions that increasingly define life here: how communities will adapt to extreme heat, how ecosystems will withstand mounting pressures and what it will take to protect the places people call home. Addressing environmental change requires more than understanding its consequences; it requires people developing new ways to respond. UCLA’s 2026 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award recognizes three women doing that work, awarding $100,000 to winner Zuzana Buřivalová, a scientist studying the sounds of tropical forests. Buřivalová, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and pri