Carbon concrete pioneer Manfred Curbach wins 2025 Nobel Sustainability Award

 Professor Manfred Curbach, internationally renowned for his research on sustainable building materials, has been named the winner of the 2025 Nobel Sustainability Academic Award. Presented by the Nobel Sustainability Trust in partnership with the Technische Universität München (TUM), this award recognises his efforts to transform the building industry through carbon-reinforced concrete, an innovation that significantly reduces the ecological footprint of construction.

This international award honours researchers and organisations whose work supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 2025 edition honours three winners: Prof. Manfred Curbach (TU Dresden) for Leadership in the Implementation of Sustainability, Prof. Paul Hebert (University of Guelph, Canada) for Biodiversity, and the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities (Australia) for Sustainable Urban Solutions.

Curbach will share a prize totalling SEK 1.3 million ($138 000), with the official ceremony taking place on 5 December 2025 in Miami during the 5th NST Summit.

For Professor Ursula Staudinger, Rector of TU Dresden, “this award recognizes his decades of commitment to sustainable construction and his groundbreaking research on carbon-reinforced concrete – a material that revolutionizes concrete, conserves resources, reduces CO2 emissions and sets new standards in environmentally friendly construction. We can now call one third of this ‘little Nobel Prize’ our own as TU Dresden – a strong sign of the international appeal and solution orientation of our research.”

Saxony’s Minister of Science, Sebastian Gemkow, sees this as confirmation of the region’s long-term strategy. “For the Free State of Saxony, this Nobel Sustainability Academic Award is a confirmation of the long-term and in a targeted manner strategy for the capabilities of Saxony as a science location“.

A pioneer in carbon-reinforced concrete

For more than thirty years, Manfred Curbach has devoted his career to rethinking construction to make it lighter, more efficient and, above all, more sustainable. His major innovation is carbon fibre-reinforced concrete (Carbonbeton), an alternative to traditional reinforced concrete, in which steel reinforcement is replaced by carbon fibre fabric. This material, which is both ultra-strong and very light, drastically reduces the amount of raw material required, while eliminating the corrosion problems associated with steel. The result is slimmer, more sustainable buildings with a carbon footprint reduced by up to 70%.

The flagship project of this revolution is the ‘CUBE’, built on the campus of TU Dresden, the world’s first building made entirely of carbon concrete. A true demonstration of feasibility, it symbolises the transition from fundamental research to industrial application. Already winner of the 2016 Deutscher Zukunftspreis, awarded by the German Federal President, Curbach sees this new prize as global recognition of his approach.

Born in Dortmund in 1956, Manfred Curbach studied civil engineering at TU Dortmund before obtaining his doctorate from the University of Karlsruhe in 1987. After a stint at Princeton University (United States), he joined the Technische Universität Dresden, where he has headed the Institute for Concrete Structures (Institut für Massivbau) since 1994. A passionate researcher and teacher, he has led numerous research programmes, including SFB 528 on textile reinforcement and TRR 280 on design strategies for carbon concrete structures. His work, at the crossroads of materials science, engineering and sustainability, has profoundly influenced renovation and construction policies in Germany and beyond.