Collaborative education for solving climate challenges

Research in the International Journal of Collaborative Engineering has found that universities that bring together environmental engineering and landscape architecture students in joint projects produce stronger design outcomes and better-prepared graduates for the world of work. These students can face real-world infrastructure challenges more effectively, the research into interdisciplinary teaching in sustainability-focused disciplines found.

The researchers focused on a persistent mismatch between professional practice and higher education. In the workplace, environmental engineers and landscape architects frequently collaborate on projects such as urban drainage systems, flood mitigation schemes, and climate adaptation plans. However, most university courses teach these two subjects separately, with few connections made between the disciplines to allow students to learn about each other’s methods, terminology, and priorities.

Environmental engineering is a discipline concerned with designing systems that protect environmental quality, including water treatment, stormwater infrastructure, and flood control. Landscape architecture focuses on shaping outdoor and urban spaces with ecological processes, human use, and aesthetics in mind. These two disciplines overlap often in practice but those working in each field will commonly have followed separate educational paths.

To test their hypothesis of whether structured collaboration might address this silo effect, the researchers embedded joint learning activities into two existing courses: an environmental engineering watershed engineering module and a landscape architecture urban design studio. Students were put into small interdisciplinary groups and given the task of developing climate-adaptive stormwater and flood management strategies for a real city. External partners introduced practical constraints, such as budgeting, planning regulations, and community requirements. This meant the students had to move beyond abstract design exercises and engage with realistic decision-making and work together to do so.

Feedback from students and instructors and an assessment of the design outcomes of the project showed that the collaboration led to a higher standard of outcome than previous iterations completed within a single discipline. Avoiding professional siloing in these two fields and other related areas is increasingly important in the context of climate change, rapid urbanisation, and growing flood risk. The challenges are inherently complex, involving environmental systems, built infrastructure and social behaviour simultaneously, and so interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving are increasingly needed in the real world.

Georgakakos, C.B., Cerra, J.F., Allred, S.B., Williams, K., Walter, M.T., LoGiudice, E. and Smith, G. (2026) ‘Cross-disciplinary learning in environmental engineering and landscape architecture’, Int. J. Collaborative Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 5, pp.1–35.