Promoting Biomimicry Towards, Sustainable Strategies for Energy-Efficient Building Design

Abstract

The elevating problems of climate change throughout the world along with the indiscriminate consumption of natural resources are creating a sense of urgency and environmental awareness, which call for fundamental changes in many industries, and the building sector is no exception. In this questioning of our model of economic growth driven by consumption and based on a greedy fossil fuel industry. Buildings consume the larger part of worldwide energy and are therefore major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, the construction sector has been identified as the sector with the largest potential to reduce energy demand and decrease GHG emissions. Over the past years, the need to fight the impacts of climate change imposes on designers and architects to improve existing techniques and adopt new strategies, technologies and methods that enable to fulfill the current challenges in terms of environmental, societal and economic considerations. Thus, the motivation arose to investigate new design ideas for buildings that could help solve such problems. We suggest in this research to question biomimicry, a new field that studies and emulates the forms, functions, and process found in nature, to solve human challenges. In this regard, the main challenge is how architects could use biomimicry as a tool for energy efficiencies design to attain buildings that respond adaptively to climate change and the environment? To sum up, our research aim is to demonstrate how to use biomimicry as an approach to enhance sustainable solutions for energy-efficient building design.