Written by Ronald Ho, Four Green Steps

San Diego Zoo in California has opened a Centre for Bioinspiration, which aims to take ideas from nature to see if they can be applied to solve human issues. Throughout the lifespan of human civilization, we have always been learning from other species to adapt to environmental change and to solve our own issues.

The Wright brothers did manage to build the first aeroplane in 1903 - after years of observing pigeons; the natural arrangement of sunflower has inspired engineers on redesigning their solar panels to capture energy from the sun much more efficiently.

There so much yet to be learnt from nature, undoubtedly.

"Biology has had a much longer time - 3.8 billion years - to address problems, and a lot of the problems are similar to those we face," said Prof Jeronimidis, of the University of Reading in the UK. In nature, some species are very resilient that they evolve to adapt to all sorts of environmental change, and that adaptability is what humankind should learn from them to sustain our prosperity.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

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