Can Biomimicry Be a Useful Tool for Design for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation? - Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering - page 82

Table 4.1 (continued)
Potential direct climate change
impacts

Consequences for the built
environment

Possible scale
of the negative
impact

Increased air pollution Impacts on interior air quality

management

Medium

Damage to building facades Low

Impacts on urban biodiversity Changes in cooling, shading and

evapotranspiration benefits from
urban biodiversity

Medium

Changes to storm water
management

Low

material, construction method, process strategies or function (Table 4.2 ). Mim-
icking living organisms or ecosystems involves a process of translation into
suitable solutions for the human context. This process of translation often results in
designs that are not immediately similar to the organism or ecosystem that inspired
them, but utilise the same functional concepts. It is important to acknowledge that
not all solutions arrived at through evolutionary processes found in organisms will
be perfect, or suitable for a human context, or result in better ecological perfor-
mance outcomes. Several noteworthy contemporary examples of biomimetic
architecture or technologies that can assist the built environment in adapting to
climate change are examined in the following sections. Additional historic
examples are detailed by Vincent et al. ( 2006 ), Vogel ( 1998 ), Benyus ( 1997 ).

4.3 Biomimicry for Mitigating GHG Emissions
from the Built Environment

Several contemporary examples of biomimetic architecture or technologies that
can assist the built environment in climate change issues will be examined to
ascertain whether biomimicry can be used to address climate change, and if so in
what way. Common mitigation strategies in a built environment context include:

1. Increasing the density and limiting sprawl of urban form to reduce building
energy use and emissions from vehicles 1 ;

1 Although this is a common mitigation strategy in the context of the built environment
(Reisinger et al. 2011 ) it is not necessarily advocated as a suitable solution in all contexts. There
is growing evidence that increasing the density of cities may not actually contribute to mitigating
the causes of climate change and that it negatively affects several other environmental
performance aspects of cities, such as flood risk, storm water issues, habitat provision, building
energy efficiency, and energy generation potentials (see: Pedersen Zari 2012 , Sect. 1.3.2.1).