Line Ramstad, director of this year's Oslo Architecture Triennale, has called on Norway to confront its contribution to global warming, telling Dezeen: "It's time Norway realises that we also need to change."

The Norwegian landscape architect, who curates the triennale under the theme "What If Nature Comes First?", argues that the construction industry's current sustainability goals fall short of what is needed to reduce carbon emissions. The main exhibition and seminars are taking place at Sofienberg Church in Oslo from 17 September to 1 October.

"For a long time, we have needed to put nature first, but we are coming to a point where we can no longer close our eyes to it because otherwise there will be no future," Ramstad said. "We need to take into consideration our position in the building industry and our ability to see solutions."

Her critique of the industry's approach is blunt. "We have started to talk about climate in our projects and our businesses, but we have tried to solve it within the system that created them, and more of the same doesn't solve anything," she said. "Our green way of doing things is not really green. We lack the holistic thinking around this."

Norway's complacency

Ramstad believes Norway's prosperity has dulled its sense of urgency. "Norway is a wonderful place to live – it's a rich country, but there's not that much willingness to change because things are going okay," she said.

"Having the triennale here is important for Norway to discuss internally what can be done – how can we shift our linear society to a circular one? Are there examples? Yes. Do we act within the system in a way that creates change? No."

She added: "It's an important topic everywhere, but it's especially important here because we don't feel the consequences [of climate change] as directly as other places in the world."

Building over waterways

Among the projects on display is General Plan 2.0 by Sigrid Legernes Teigen and Greta Gleisner Birkeland, which criticises decades of building over Oslo's historic waterways — a practice that has contributed to increased flooding — and proposes a city plan that grows alongside the water.

"It's impressive what Sigrid and Greta have done," said Ramstad. "When rivers and wetlands become something we can build on, that's crazy. That's not putting nature first, and nature's natural forces will work against us, so what if we work with nature and plan our cities accordingly?"

Fifteen years on the Myanmar-Thailand border

Ramstad credits her advocacy to an upbringing on a farm and to her grandmother, a feminist and environmentalist. In 2009 she founded the non-profit architecture group Gyaw Gyaw and spent 15 years on the Myanmar-Thailand border constructing buildings with local communities.

"The results of our actions are so clear there," she said. "We built with local colleagues who have this closeness to what they're doing that we have lost a little here."

Returning to Norway proved difficult. "Moving back to Norway was challenging after years of living in my jungle bubble," she said. "I have always had a sustainable approach, but coming back and meeting the reality in Norway, I was a little bit like, oh my God, we've gone far away in just 15 years. We removed ourselves a lot from what my grandparents used to do."

Hope, step by step

Despite the scale of the challenge, the triennale has left Ramstad optimistic. "Working with this exhibition and this triennale has made me more hopeful than I was before because there is a great movement into thinking more holistically and circularly," she said.

She acknowledges that systemic change is required for architects' ecological proposals to reach construction. "Architects are very concerned about [putting nature first], but when the system around an architect is not, it requires a lot for that office to implement a change by themselves," she said.

"I hope that conversations here can inspire people to at least try, to get someone on board, see good examples and think, 'They did it there, so we can do it here'. We will make it, step by step."