Imagine visiting a hi-tech museum and being guided by an AI robot. No, you are not experiencing a remake of the “2001.

The city has a climate that is good for agriculture : one fifth of Turkey's fruit and vegetable exports and more than 30% of its greenhouse areas come from just this one region.

The ongoing energy crisis, which started in summer 2021 due to low natural gas supply and which further deteriorated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has highlighted the urgent need for a more independent European energy policy .

In the city, the famous Cabanyal district which had been home to a local fishing community for a long time, has recently been transformed into a testing ground for numerous energy efficiency techniques.

The Turkish city of Antalya, on the country’s southwest coast, is perhaps best known internationally as a holiday destination. But as one of Turkey’s largest cities, Antalya is home to around 2.

In his song ‘ Concrete Jungle ’, the reggae legend Bob Marley sang wistfully about being trapped in a dense and oppressive urban environment ‘where the living is hardest’, all the while longing for the ‘sweet life’.

Climate change effects combined with pollution, heat waves and overpopulation are amongst the main challenges facing our cities today. To address them, cities are turning to so-called ‘ Nature-based solutions ’ or NBS.

The global transition from an economy underpinned by fossil fuels to an economy powered by renewable energy is well underway. The pace of that transition, however, has come under scrutiny – especially at the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

What do cucumber, almonds, onions and avocados have in common? Besides being potential ingredients for your next salad, all those plants need pollinators to reproduce : animals that move pollen from the male part of the flower to the female one.

It was one of the worst disasters in the history of the Aegean cities: last summer big forest fires hit the western Turkish province of Izmir. They started on August 18 ravaging the districts of Karabağlar, Menderes and Seferihisar for four days.

Would you enjoy a city full of parks, where streets were tree-lined, where cycling and walking were pleasant, a city with grass-insulated roofs on houses and public buildings to keep you warm in winter? According to a Eurobarometer study , there is an 84 per cent chance that your answer is yes.

Cycling in busy cities can be very dangerous. According to the World Health Organization 54% of traffic-related death are among pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists.

Today´s liberalised markets are focused on short-term return on capital, but energy infrastructure planning should be driven by the objective of climate protection.

Fighting climate change is the challenge of the century. The last UN Environment Emissions Gap Report warned that, in order to ensure global warming stays below 2°C, efforts should be tripled , and if we want to stay below 1.

Door locks that open with fingerprints, networked security cameras, smart light bulbs, smart washing machines: technology is transforming our homes, turning the tech dreams of yesterday into the reality of today.

There is no such thing as a perfect energy efficient process. The second law of thermodynamics states that all energy generating processes produce heat as a by-product.

Some modern systems are now using sustainable heating sources, like waste heat from power plants . Could this approach contribute to fight climate change? We report from Western Turkey where the city of Soma is taking a new approach to increase energy efficiency in a residential area.

Local governments in Europe are notoriously risk averse, city council officials and industry leaders won’t hesitate to tell you.

Home sweet home. Houses are supposed to be our nest, a shelter from the world outside. But how healthy are European homes? Nowadays most of our time is spent indoors, often at home, one reason being the current shift to “desk jobs”.

As air pollution is largely considered to be an outdoor problem, people are little aware of indoor contaminants . The World Health Organisation estimated that each year 4.3 million people die of exposure to household pollutants.