https://www.wired.com/story/building-high-rises-out-of-wood-can-help-save-the-planet/

The modern industrial era was literally built on steel and concrete, readily available materials that gave buildings the strength to stretch hundreds of stories into the sky. Unlike wood, steel and concrete don’t catch fire from a mere dropped lantern. Soon, city-razing conflagrations, like those of San Francisco in 1906 and Chicago in 1871, were a thing of the past—at least until climate change began supercharging wildfires in California.

Poor old wood had been relegated to smaller buildings like homes until environmental scientists started raising their voices about something everyone was overlooking: Manufacturing steel and concrete pumps massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, both in terms of the energy it takes to make the stuff, and the CO2 that spews from chemical reactions as the materials form. Wood, on the other hand, actually captures carbon, at least during the time when it’s part of a living tree, as a tree’s leaves suck in CO2 during photosynthesis. Once trapped inside the wood, all that carbon stays out of the atmosphere.