How Can We Innovate Through Nature? | محاكاة الطبيعة لتصميم مستقبل مستدام للبشرية

we're now moving on to a little bit of a different dynamic and really focusing on the future outlook what future endeavors lie ahead of us and what opportunities lie ahead for humanity it is now my pleasure to welcome janine benyas established author and co-founder of the biomimicry institute 3.8 and korean eosio and editor-in-chief of popular science to share their thoughts and insight on the various ways biomimicry can help stem the tide of the covet 19 pandemic and its devastating consequences through design and through looking into nature lies a million opportunities [Music] thank you to the world government summit for that great introduction my name is corinne iozio i'm the editor-in-chief of popular science and i'm super thrilled to be here today to talk to janine benius the founder of biomimicry 3.8 janine thank you for joining us how are you i'm well be with you so i think the best place for us to start this conversation is to set some table stakes can you give us a working definition of what biomimicry means i think if if you tease apart the words it might be self-explanatory but there's certainly more going on here than we might realize bio means life mimic so it's to mimic it's to mimic life and what biomimicry is is an innovation practice so it's where um biologists sit down with engineers and inventors and they talk about life's best ideas and then biomimicry is emulating those designs chemical recipes those processes those strategies ecosystem strategies to make more sustainable products and so in terms of these yes so in terms of the the disciplines of science involved here it sounds like you touch pretty much everything but clearly a lot of materials right yes material sciences is really one of the most advanced parts of biomimicry um the way we make our world is is pretty important and um so biomimics are looking at for instance with the during the pandemic um they're looking at how to keep bacteria and viruses from settling on surfaces there's a company called chartlet and they've mimicked the textural pattern on a shark and put that on adhesive films to on high touch surfaces in hospitals for instance doorknobs and railings and it it repels bacteria rather than killing them so it doesn't it doesn't breed for resistance um with climate change we're looking for ways that uh to take co2 and turn that into materials and life knows how to do that plants do that all the time coral reefs do that so we have people doing biodegradable plastics using co2 as a raw material that's mimicking plants and mimicking coral reefs by putting co2 into concrete another example would be desalination um you know mangroves can or plants that can desalinate water and they do this with membranes that have these special pores in them that move the water through so people are now membranes with by those pores doing osmosis instead of a reverse osmosis very low power low cost desalination there's all kinds of technical uh solutions all the way up to the ways we uh we design our cities so before we talk about the future design and that is certainly something that i know we're going to to touch on i want to talk about how biomimicry can help us diagnose what has gone wrong what are the the natural systems and what do they say about how a pandemic like covid19 can obviously not it didn't just suddenly happen but i'm sure that nature has some clues for us about where we went wrong absolutely i think what we realized is that that planetary health is public health and we're realizing that the spillover from bats to people that is happening more and more 76 percent of our emerging diseases are zoonotic they're coming from animals and it happens when we when our developments whether they be housing or agriculture or mining or cutting we move habitats that these organisms have lived in um for in bats cases millions of years um we suddenly stress them and they begin to shed viruses and that's how spillover happens so it it really it makes us ask the question um are we how are we making our world right how do we how can we do it without currently looking for virgin materials and going and mining in in wild places um which brings us to i think one of the most important things going to be looking coming decade is what's called the circular economy where it's you know recycling on steroids it's really taking its industrial recycling where where companies are literally sharing their byproducts with one another in a food web in an industrial ecology but products are not just landfilled they're actually taken back and they're turned into into new products biomimicry comes into play there because life is the original circular economy the reason that um life has such gonna be to be able to upcycle its materials into you know a log gets up-cycled into bacteria and fungi that feed on that log and then those materials get up-cycled into mice get up cycled into the hawk that eats the mouse right um so we're not talking necessarily sorry so we're not talking necessarily about a closed loop which is a little bit of a buzzword right we're not talking about an iphone becomes another iphone or a refrigerator becomes another refrigerator we're talking about the materials the component parts and how they continue their life afterwards that's right that's right because that's that's what happens there's an upcycling cascade in the natural world it's not a log becoming a tree it's a log becoming lots of other things um and this is what's happening right now what's what stops it from happening frankly is that we have so many different kinds of chemicals that we use this is a very small subset of the periodic table it uses about six elements and then you know primarily and then about 25 elements total and we use the whole periodic table uh life uses those simp that simple subset adds design adds structure to those materials uh to those elements and then when it comes time to reconfigure those elements into something else there's there's a chemistry able to break that apart and turn it into something else we need to mimic nature's chemistry uh textbook and that's what's happening now with biomedic chemistry so you that's a great segue because my next question was how do we take these practices and encourage those with the means of production how do we create systems that enable this type of thinking to happen yeah i mean i think you know um it's it's really important to have a research pipeline because this kind of work this biomimicry research it entails having biologists who know enough about the sustainability issues that we have to be able to bring up the biological solutions at the moment of creation we've created something um at our non-profit the biomimicry institute we've created something called ask nature to try to do this digitally so that when designers or engineers or chemists sit down and they they type in a function such as water repellency the biological solutions will come up they'll they'll allow ducks to do how leave and those are those are models inspirational models um and actually engineering models to to enable them to um do more than just get inspiration from the natural world but actually get the blueprints from the natural world and that's that's what's necessary especially as we move to things like um 3d printing new ways of manufacturing additive manufacturing where we can use a build file to add very intricate structures to common materials to give them the functionality that we want um so i think you know the funding this kind of research is going to be really really important in the future this kind of use-directed research use directed biology research i mean right so focusing as much on the on the application yes yeah yeah i mean the the the way a biomimic thinks um and this is something that always makes people sort of gasp because it's so obvious when you talk about it but with coronavirus um bats have been living for millions of years um with high viral loads and they do quite well that is something we need to study how is it that they do not their immune systems do not react the way ours do and get super inflamed and they've got different ways of dealing with viral loads and they've done this for millions of years so that's the those are the sorts of research questions um we need to be bringing young people into right now um with with application um in mind so probably the most tangible application you know i know that your work has informed carpet design and you mentioned concrete as an example but i what how do we think about it in the really large scale the large-scale built environment schools parking facilities office buildings industrial campuses that we need these places to exist to produce these things right to even have an idealized factory you still have to build it but how does it exist in an environment without creating more spillover opportunity right exactly well you know the the other thing about biodiversity as it relates to this pandemic is that we didn't have the full roster of species and when when we don't have the full predator and prey relationships going on we we also have more spillovers um so for instance if you've got lyme's disease for instance which is you know there's a really good host which is mouse well the red foxes um used to prey on white-footed mice but then coyote populations went uh sky high and and they eat the red foxes and that's because we we brought the you know we took that aprex predator of the wolf away that used to take care of a coyote so what we now have is um even you know it's it's more than just being next to uh wild lands it's making sure that those wild lands are healthy that they have the full roster of species so what we're doing now when we look at what does it take to make a biomimetic development i see we're working a lot we have something called project positive in our consultancy where we're working with companies like google and and microsoft and ford that build factories and data centers how do they build them in ways that actually contribute to ecosystem health and that's called ecosystem services when it when nature gives us these free suburban sequestration and habitat support and flood cooling the air and cleaning the air those those ecosystem services have always been something that we consume but what we're asking now is can we produce them so can you build a building angela and landscape in such a way as to store water to sequester carbon to actually support wildlife whether it's in your green roof or whether you're doing habit texture where you're creating niches for for hawks to nest that that idea that we take all of the ecosystem services mentioned in the millennial assessment and we say how is the ecosystem next door a relatively healthy ecosystem we actually measure that we get metrics when you turn it into metrics that's when when engineers who are builders are are and planners are actually able to pay well i have to store a certain amount of water maybe i need to make permeable pavement parking lots or short or reduce my parking lots maybe i need to do awnings to have the building be able to shade and cool temperatures maybe by planting more trees i take out pollutants and i help with asthma rates which lowers the comorbidities next time there's a pandemic right so this idea is uh positive it's to produce positive ecosystem services as we build and it's it's a king but it literally is biomimicry at the level so basically if we're if in the footprint of the building there are x amount of trees and x amount of trees recycle sequester a certain amount of carbon and convert as much carbon dioxide into fresh breathable air the building must then replace what those trees what what was in the its footprint that is no longer true yeah exactly exactly is what what whatever system would be there whether it's a prayer for us depending on where you are in the world we look at that at the systems that are currently working and we get we get a set of metrics and we try to meet them so if you're doing carbon sequestration you might plant trees you might also use in your building you might use co2 sequestering concrete biomimetic concrete you might use mass timbers and together your building and your site adds up to trying to match or even exceed the ecosystem services so imagine a city that the water leaving it is cleaner than the water that comes in and you say oh that's that's hard to imagine it's not really because that's what a forest does so what we're saying is be as high performing as worst next door it's a new way of thinking but we've watched it we've watched companies like ford adopt it now for all of their all of their buildings in the ford land sustainability strategy it's the next i think it's the next natural thing after net zero once we reduce the harm that we're causing how do we then go to positive and place creating it from place is a really powerful way to do it and once you finish with your developments you can start saying well how can we do agriculture in a way that stores more water in a way that stores more carbon what about the supply chain of the food that we're putting in our cafeteria can we also count the positive ecosystem services that come from us asking for a different management strategy on those lands right so it it becomes this kind of project by project a pixelated healing um and these kinds of these are the kinds of large and radical um moves that we as a species i think need to take post-pandemic we're going to bounce forward instead of bouncing back right but that always comes back to the monday morning question what do we do about it how do we create a world where this is a type of thinking that is actionable or incentivized yeah exactly incentivized is a good way of putting it because i think for instance with that project positive imagine if a city as part of their sustainability vision and their climate change resilience vision said we we want you to meet these ecosystem service goals per acre on your on your developments that's a policy decision um it it also can be a voluntary decision for instance companies can join monday morning you could join positive at the biomimicry.net site where a lot of you know kohler and and ford and microsoft and google and interface and aquafill um a lot of uh university campuses corporate campuses so join that and then it's a learning cohort and um begin to make a plan that over the next 20 years you're going to increase ecosys provision from your landscapes uh and from your building sites that's one thing um another thing is just see what the biomimicry community in your country because there's there's we've got 48 uh hubs we've started um biomimicry hubs where there are consultancies within your country meaning you can bring biologists to timetable um that's that's the the monday morning thing it's it's you know where ideo used to bring you know starting ergonomics people and psychologists to the design table we're now bringing biologists so find a biologist hire a biologist for your next design um endeavor that's another way uh we've got design challenges um you can send um countries are sending teams of young entrepreneurs basically who are creating biomimetic solutions like charlotte um for uh important planetary challenges so that way join a dis send a design challenge team so the last thing that i want to talk about it's going to jump back to something that you touched on is this notion of of planning because in terms of our supply chains covid showed all of the places where the chain is a little bit broken and nature is so excellent at distributing resources and getting them where they need to go what inspiration is there in that a biomimic could point to for us to be able to get the things that need to be places where they need to be yeah you're right the the distribution networks in the natural world are not just um effective but they're they're now being studied for their strategies that we can mimic so when you look at your blood vessels branching your branching um uh lung your bronchia or tree branches or roots what you're seeing is a distribution network and the imperative is to get nutrients or life life-giving gases to every cell and what that means is you've got it it's a fractal you've got to actually get very small um flows going at local regions at local areas so think small think small local banks being able to get resource to local people you also have you you've also got a you've got small medium and large you've got you've got regional um or midsize flows happening in the natural world think ecosystems where you've got not just individual trees but you trees that are connected to one another you've got large flows distribution flows and these are the oxygen cycle and the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle globally all three of those scales are important and when we lose local businesses and we move just to large businesses only we get a lot of efficiencies but we lose that distribution ability so now economists there's people at um the capital institute for instance doing regenerative economies and they're suggesting that we actually look at do you have the full complement of scales have we for instance created too many regional banks right that and left the little banks behind how do we how do we make sure we've got those distribution networks of course you know this this idea of i think that's going to be very important is is local distributed manufacturing in the same way attributed energy that we're looking at distributed water treatment distributed manufacturing if it's safe you could have um additive manufacturing locally using local raw materials it's not going to take away global flows i think they're still going to be important in an industrial ecology um but we've realized that we need self-sufficiency for resilience and we need the large flows for efficiency yeah you need it there's certainly there's certainly many many lessons i'm sure we could talk for another hour or two without even stretching the possibilities here but i think that there are some excellent lessons that we've already started to crack open where we can take the lessons from biomimicry and and help move ourselves forward to a shiny better future uh thank you so much janine for for talking with us today it's been really enlightening thank you thank you for having me anthony government summit as well enjoyed it thank you janine and crying for such an interesting conversation

Channel: World Government Summit

Views: 115

Rating: 4.1999998 out of 5

Keywords: #WorldGovSummit, #Dubai, #UAE, #MyDubai, #Space, #ClimateChange, #Technology, #Happiness, #Youth, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #دبي, #الإمارات, #الحكومات, #الإمارات_العربية_المتحدة, #القمة_العالمية_للحكومات

Id: STw6nQ7uU44

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021