Biomimetic Architecture and Its Role in Developing Sustainable, Regenerative, and Livable Cities: Global Perspectives and Approaches in the Age of COVID-19

This book focuses on understanding biomimetic architecture and its role as a sustainable design tool. It presents the role of biomimicry in mitigation and adaptation to climate change and examines how biomimetic architecture can provide healthy solutions to limit the spread of COVID-19 in buildings and cities. Coverage includes global examples of biomimetic approaches and buildings, an evaluation of the performance of biomimicry applications in architecture to illustrate best practices, and an exploration of how nature can offer inspiration in building design to conserve resources and save energy use as well as curb carbon emissions - a reaffirmed goal of COP 26 and an outcome of Glasgow Climate Pact. Finally, the book presents guidelines to enhance urban areas and healthier spaces in buildings to meet COVID-19 social distance regulations and beyond. • Examines global applications of biomimicry in architecture;• Highlights the importance of biomimicry in driving livability in cities and buildings;• Explores the role of biomimetic architecture in mitigating climate change. "The line of argument developed is highly relevant to the present, in addition to being original and pertinent to research on urban regeneration, especially in regard to the exploration of the use of biomimicry architecture in response to changing urban demands.” -Alessandra Battisti, Ph.D., Professor of Architecture, University of Rome La Sapienza. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Biomimicry as a Turning Point in Reducing COVID-19 Infection

The vision behind biomimicry has always been the pursuit of solving the difficult problems that confront us in life in general, and architecture in particular. The coronavirus is without a doubt the most serious problem and the most dangerous threat since 2019 till now. And architecture has a human dimension that is interested in the prevention of infection and disease and keep human health. This necessitates architects and researchers to attempt to gain access to approaches that make human life less dangerous and threatening, as well as design that is safer and has fewer infection causes. The purpose of this paper is to create indicators that aid in the reduction of coronavirus infection by using nature and its characteristics as a model, which will serve as a starting point for the pandemic architecture of the coronavirus era. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Delta University Scientific Journal is the property of Association of Arab Universities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Nanotechnology and stem cell therapy for combating COVID-19

After the initial occurrence in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, at the end of the year 2019, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, has wreaked havoc on livelihoods and health worldwide. By the end of June 2021, more than 3 million deaths and a total of more than 179 million positive cases have been registered, and the numbers are steadily climbing (https://covid19.who.int/). The principal life-threatening manifestations of COVID-19 illness are caused by the dysregulated immune system and inflammatory response triggered by a surge of cytokines known as cytokine storm. This makes the lower respiratory tract more susceptible to infection resulting in acute lung injury/acute respiratory distress syndrome intermittently resulting in the death of the patient. The range of medicinal therapy available to treat COVID-19 is continuously expanding and includes both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs as well as medications approved for emergency use by the FDA. The world has greeted extremely encouraging and long-awaited COVID-19 vaccination. A total of 2,624,733,776 vaccine doses have been globally administered (https://covid19.who.int/) by June 23, 2021. Even though prevention therapy in form of vaccinations is currently accessible to some, logistics and limited supplies will make it months before the entire world gets vaccinated. Even after more than one and a half years of this global threat, there are no specific therapeutics to treat this viral infection with only a few repurposed drugs authorized to treat COVID-19. Hence, multiple treatment strategies to reduce the severity of COVID-19 impact on patients must be explored. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Biomimicry Training to Promote Employee Engagement in Sustainability.

Employees play a critical role in the success of corporate sustainability initiatives, yet sustained employee engagement is a constant challenge. The psychology literature states that to intrinsically motivate employees to engage in sustainability, there must be opportunity for employees to engage in practices that are directly relevant to their job duties. Traditional ad hoc initiatives such as Earth Week events, recycling challenges and so on, are not sufficient to derive this type of intrinsic motivation. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine the psychological impact of a biomimicry sustainable innovation training program, to intrinsically motivate R&D employees to reconnect with nature and identify whether this promotes creative thinking and employee engagement. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the current study conducted virtual workshops with R&D employees and demonstrated that biomimicry training was intrinsically motivating to employees and was valued as a practice that could be incorporated into R&D job duties. In conclusion, this study provides an adaptable procedural template for biomimicry training with a corporate audience. The results demonstrate a strong business case for organizations to experiment with biomimicry by illustrating its potential to create positive change across several business units beyond sustainable innovation to include human resources and sustainable marketing.

Surviving disruption: nature inspired solutions

Purpose Decision-makers in companies increasingly face unprecedented natural disasters. When business continuity is at risk, managers need a framework to imminently react. Design/methodology/approach A literature review and analysis of survival responses in nature and business case examples of company responses to the Covid-19 pandemic was the approach used. Findings There are direct parallels between the physiological stress response when a living individual perceives a threat to its survival, and the immediate reactions that occur when companies are faced with a disruptive event. Practical implications This article is meant to be used by decision-makers in companies to better react to disruptive events. Originality/value While nature-inspired methods have inspired inventions and algorithms, Hans Selye's general adaptation theory has not been used in parallel with business scenarios. We correlate fundamental organism survival mechanisms with a risk response framework to improve the probability of business survival during external threats.

Addressing sustainability gaps.

Widespread industrialization, rapid urbanization, and massive transport through land, waters, and air have led to catastrophes such as climate change, water pollution, resource limitation, and pandemics causing severe economic consequences, massive influences on the natural environment and pose a great threat to the life sustainability. Sustainability topic has a long history, and many policies and initiatives are in effect for a sustainable planet Earth, still gaps of varying degrees exist in almost all sectors. This article addresses the essentiality of minimising the sustainability gaps exist in diverse realms of life and citing few examples. Creating a cyclic path for production-consumption process in the economic sector through promoting circular economy, learning from the natural processes through appropriate biomimicking, and knowledge-integration from diverse disciplines and emphasizing sustainability in the educational sector are shown to lower the sustainability gaps.