Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.
Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.
A new website tries to organise all biological information by function and asks the question - what can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, can ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")
Meanwhile, engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.
