Our buildings are monuments to extraction and extreme emissions. But what if we turned from destructive concrete to timber?

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I travelled to Oslo in the early autumn. It felt like arriving into the future. Or, at least, a fragment of a possible future. I drove north in the quiet digital bubble of my electric rental car. In 2024, Norway became the first country in the world where electric cars outnumbered petrol cars.

A smooth, pristine motorway unfolded between farmlands and low hillsides of dense green forest. Long tunnels carried the route up above the banks of Lake Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. After a little more than an hour, the road curved downward to run parallel to the lakeshore.

Growing evidence that cutting coal use and bans on high-polluting vehicles are leading directly to health benefits

Failing crops, wildfires and overloaded health systems are focusing minds on the local impacts of our changing climate.

While carbon emissions reduction is normally framed as having a global benefit rather than a local gain, studies published in 2025 and 2026 from Greece have added to growing evidence that cutting coal use and air pollution can provide immediate health benefits to local communities.

With heatwaves now recognised as disasters, personal testimonies are key to a new project that looks to protect those living in the most cramped districts of India’s capital

Every summer evening, Gulshan follows the same routine. She washes the floor of her one-room home several times so it cools a little for her four children to sleep on. Last summer, the family saved enough to buy a desert cooler, which uses evaporation as a cheaper alternative to air conditioning.

The family uses the appliance cautiously to save on energy costs. But even when it is on, Gulshan, who does not use a surname, has to dampen everyone’s clothes before sleeping. The 39-year-old and her children now have rashes and one has a skin infection from the wet cloth against their skin.

Architect’s vision for redevelopment of heart of EU quarter unrealised amid political wrangling and rising costs

The redevelopment plan for Schuman Square at the heart of the EU quarter in Brussels was very ambitious. From a traffic-clogged, nondescript roundabout, it would become “an urban agora”, a greener, calmer meeting place, nothing less, said a former head of the Brussels government, than “a symbol that beats as the heart … of the European project”.

It did not turn out that way. The result, say critics, is Europe’s largest frying pan, a concrete expanse with little greenery or shade. While the number of cars has reduced and the space is remodelled with smart grey paving, the centrepiece – a steel canopy with a green roof – was never built.

An old west African practice of sending children away to study is being used as a cover for trafficking, say human rights groups

In a bare, gloomy room on the beachfront at Saint-Louis, in the north-west of Senegal, dozens of young boys sit on a concrete floor chanting verses from the Qur’an, surrounded by fishing boats and piles of rubbish. It is early in the morning but the children have already been up for hours, not to study but to walk the streets begging for food and money.

Every day, these talibés, or students of the Qur’an, join thousands of other boys, some as young as five, on the streets of the city in search of a piece of baguette, a handful of rice or a few coins. They beg not just to fill their own stomachs but also the pockets of their Qur’anic teachers, or marabouts.

Talibés prepare to study the Qur’an under a marabout, or religious teacher, at a daara, or Qur’anic school, in Saint-Louis

New £500m town centre welcomes its first tenant this month, but displaced traders say promises that they could return have been broken

Diana Sach once employed more than 30 people and catered for hundreds more every day from her Latin American restaurant and delicatessen, famous for its Peruvian empanadas, in south London’s Elephant and Castle district.

Now, she looks longingly at the shiny tall buildings that have replaced the brightly coloured but shabby shopping centre that was her home from home before being demolished in 2021.