Engineers are turning to nature’s time-tested processes to construct infrastructure that adapts to stress and emerges stronger after disturbance.
Some of the most recent innovative advances in engineering have taken their cues from the natural world – from high-rise towers that flex like coastal trees to bullet trains shaped like kingfisher beaks.
But it’s also through disruption that nature’s ingenuity is forged, revealing design lessons in resilience and adaptability.
Nature’s solutions, honed over millions of years, offer blueprints for systems that are not only robust, but also adaptive, resilient and regenerative.
By studying how ecosystems adapt to stress, recover from disturbance and even emerge stronger, engineers such as Professor Cheryl Desha FIEAust CPEng, Science and Innovation Director at Natural Hazards Research Australia, are uncovering design principles that promise to revolutionise infrastructure, urban planning and hazard mitigation.
Adaptive engineering through biomimicry
Drawing inspiration from nature’s processes, structures, and systems, Desha’s career has focussed on using biomimicry to develop resilient and sustainable solutions for urban infrastructure and disaster management – aiming to build cities that are both adaptable and regenerative.
At its core, biomimicry honors natural systems in their place and seeks inspiration from their processes to craft solutions that work in harmony with the environment.
“There are opportunities right in front of us, from looking at form – the way trees grow to the interactions of roots underground, to the way that animals and critters react to disruption, adapting to coexist in their changing habitat,” she said.
For instance, coastal trees that bend and spiral to withstand relentless wind
“That’s all about providing the tree with some spring so it can withstand being pushed against and can spring back,” she said.
Engineers have translated this principle into skyscraper design, embedding helical structural elements that flex under typhoon-force gusts and then rebound, reducing material fatigue.
Similarly, the segmented form of bamboo has inspired seismic-resilient building frames. By mimicking bamboo’s natural joints, structures gain controlled deformation zones that dissipate earthquake energy.
“We are learning from bamboo’s lateral strip structure to design for earthquakes, so that our buildings have more resilience,” Desha added.
Read more: Three award-winning buildings that use biomimicry
The three pillars of biomimicry
Beyond form, biomimicry extends to function. One standout example is Japan’s Shinkansen train, whose original bullet-shaped nose compressed air as it entered tunnels at high speed, generating a pressure wave that erupted into a “tunnel boom” that cracked glass in properties nearby. To eliminate that shock wave, engineers had to rethink the nose’s shape from the ground up.
“There were bird watchers in the design team who thought, ‘where in nature would we find a critter that goes from one medium to another really efficiently?’” Desha said. “And the Kingfisher came to mind, as it goes from air to water to air super speedily with almost no energy lost.”
Inspired by the kingfisher’s long, slender beak, the 500 Series Shinkansen’s nose slices through tunnel air more smoothly, dramatically reducing the micro-pressure waves that cause sonic booms on exit.
On a larger scale, systems or processes can also emulate nature through biomimicry – for example, supporting resilient community planning in the face of climate change.
“For example, when considering how different species interact with each other in a forest, we might use that to shape how we plan out a residential community – emulating the way forests are set up in terms of food, foraging, places to relax and places to seek refuge during extreme wind, rain, flooding and bushfires,” she said.
Resilience through adaptation
Central to biomimicry-inspired engineering is the idea of resilience, not just the ability to withstand shocks or disasters, but to adapt to and emerge stronger from them.
“A successful engineered solution adapts with the shocks that are presented to it over time, building resilience to those shocks and adaptation strategies that allow it to thrive – with what initially might appear as a shock actually becoming an asset or a feature of that particular system,” Desha said.
Take natural systems such as floodplains, for example, which benefit from periodic flooding to bring more nutrients and sediment down from the highlands.
“When humans are in the wrong place at the wrong time, overwhelming local capacity to manage, it’s a disaster,” she said. “Planning ahead to be out of harm’s way – temporarily or permanently – means we can live alongside natural system processes in a changing climate, potentially avoiding disasters and the significant costs of response and recovery.”
Adaptive systems, those that can absorb and even benefit from disruption, are the gold standard for resilience.
“Resilience doesn’t necessarily mean bigger, fatter, wider or denser, it might actually be lighter or more flexible,” Desha said.
When to rebuild or redesign?
When disaster strikes, the instinct is often to rebuild what was lost. But Desha challenges this approach, advocating for a more nuanced decision-making process that weighs the cost of restoration against the benefits of redesigning and rebuilding with future disruption in mind.
“Urban development tends to be in places that are flat, close to a ready water source, and historically have a warm and temperate climate,” she said. “But with climate change, we’re seeing those parts of the planet become susceptible to sea level rise and more severe coastal weather events such as cyclones.”
Working with nature means acknowledging that disruption is useful for us on many levels – shifting from viewing hazards as threatening to seeing them as opportunities for learning and adaptation.
“There are circumstances where a particular place might no longer be suitable for us to live, but it might be suitable for us to manage for carbon capture, biodiversity or sustainable food production,” Desha said. “Choice is then expanded, because it’s not about whether we move away from a place – it’s about how we relate to it, which might end up being super positive, such as restoring a wetland or flood plain.”
Indigenous wisdom and engineering practice
Desha is a strong proponent of learning from First Nations knowledges, particularly in the context of thinking about “natural hazards” and living in Australia.
“We often think of fire or water when we think about natural hazards,” she said. “But learning from First Nations perspectives, if we start to think about them together, there’s really interesting opportunities that open up.”
These principles have guided the creation of “green fire breaks” – corridors planted with less-flammable species that slow fire spread without gouging the landscape.
“That means cooler fires might never reach a particular suburb, subdivision on a property or piece of infrastructure,” Desha said. “We want to live and work with nature to avoid things getting catastrophic. Once you get to catastrophic fire conditions, the heat load and the travel speed of fire is so intense that these measures aren’t enough.”
That’s why caring for Country is so important. Stakeholders on North Stradbroke Island, for instance, partnered with the Queensland Reconstruction Authority and Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation to develop comprehensive bushfire management plans for the three local townships, incorporating traditional burning techniques.
“The focus was to restore the health of Country. Because cultural land management practice had been disrupted for centuries, the fuel load goes really high with devastating fires. It’s about stewardship – bringing the environment back into balance.”
Green roofs and rain gardens for urban resilience
As built landscapes densify, dark surfaces such as bitumen and asphalt become the norm.
In response to more frequent and intense heatwaves around Australia, green roofs are emerging as a powerful tool for cooling our cities, managing stormwater run-off, and fostering biodiversity and carbon capture. Simple changes to roofscapes having outsized impacts on urban liveability and flood resilience – as outlined in a discussion paper by Natural Hazards Research Australia and Suncorp on nature-positive disaster risk reduction solutions.
“Green roofs provide immediate cooling potential in terms of microclimates around our properties,” Desha said.
This can include anything from shading the western side of buildings to creating gardens that are both cyclone resilient and bushfire-safe. Beyond temperature control, green roofs also slow the flow of rainwater from roof to gutter to street and into catchments.
“Where a particular area gets a sudden drenching, having the ability to catch the water quickly with tanks and some green scape around the house or roof makes a big difference,” she said.
Larger rain gardens and swales are also gaining traction as low-cost, high-return interventions for stormwater management.
“Infrastructure corridor gardens and grass swales, rather than concrete channels, emulate the natural system when water is allowed to pond and percolate rather than run off,” Desha said.
Local and regional councils are increasingly turning to these low-maintenance, nature-based measures with modest upfront costs to bolster flood and fire resilience without the expense of large-scale grey infrastructure.
“These are tools we can retrofit and design into our master planning which produce a good return on investment – especially for regional councils where infrastructure is really expensive for a smaller population base.”
Bearing in mind that we are already experiencing climate change effects, nature-inspired strategies are a smart way forward for building more resilient infrastructure, unlocking multiple benefits over the coming decade.
“In nature we don’t see problems; we see systems working together extraordinarily well. Where there’s a ‘problem’ there’s an opportunity.”
Join Cheryl Desha and explore new ways of constructing a resilient environment at Engineers Australia’s Climate Smart Engineering (CSE) conference 2025.
