How plants and animals are teaching scientists to fight climate change

The immensity of a program to reforest large swaths of the Amazon is hard to conceive — it aims to plant millions of trees over a remote area of Brazil roughly the size of Pennsylvania. If that wasn’t a big enough challenge, there’s also the threat seedlings face from dry spells, non-native plants, and the voracious leaf-cutter ant. Enter a Brazilian industrial engineer and his partners, who think they have a solution. The team calls their invention Nucleario — a circular device that creates a safe oasis for a young tree, complete with mulchy ground cover, a water cistern to conserve rainfall and a wall to keep out invasive plants and creatures. The invention was recently awarded a $100,000 prize in a worldwide design challenge, sponsored by the Biomimicry Institute, a Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit that supports scientists and inventors who find solutions to man-made problems with designs inspired by the natural world. The concept of biomimicry has been around for years. Designers have replicated the skin of the octopus to invent a camouflaged surface that could help robots change color and texture. They have studied squid and jellyfish to look for a better propulsion system for submarines. And a Boston research hospital mimicked the behavior of underwater worms to develop a glue that knits together fragile heart muscles. Now, advocates of such bio-inspired engineering are urging inventors to apply nature’s lessons to the challenge of global warming. Along with Nucleario’s forest-restoration device, finalists in the global design challenge have included a window-mounted device, designed like the rose-shaped frailejon plant, to cool buildings with less electricity, and a roadside filter that mimics the straining properties of baleen whales to clean fine particulate pollution from the air. Some of the most promising biomimicry designs have already been deployed, including several that capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise spew into the air and use it to make everything from plastics to a key element of concrete. Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimcry Institute, said the Nucleario concept is emblematic of solutions drawn from nature. “Learning about the natural world is one thing. Learning from the natural world — that’s the profound switch,” said Benyus, author of the 1997 book, “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” “We need to restore the rainforest quickly, so it makes perfect sense to study the surrounding ecosystem — how the forest floor and local plants create conditions that nurture new trees — and borrow those strategies to do the same."

LEARNING FROM THE FOREST

Nucleario grew out of the profound love three Brazilians had for the rainforest that covers much of their country, but that has been degraded by logging and clear-cutting for new farms and development. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the Amazon lost nearly 3.5 million acres of forest a year in the dozen years after 2000. That’s an area the size of Connecticut stripped annually of oxygen-producing and carbon-absorbing forest. Nucleario co-founder Bruno Rutman was drawn to the problem of deforestation because of a youth spent kayaking, paragliding and climbing in Brazil’s coastal rainforest. In his day job as an industrial designer he worked on products like furniture, but after hours he thought about how his country might meet its commitment, under the Paris climate accord, to replant nearly 30 million acres of forest by 2030. The Nucleario is still a prototype, with some 500 installed with seedlings in several test patches around Brazil, according to the Biomimicry Institute. The test groves have been funded by grants from universities and the World Wildlife Fund. The $100,000 prize taken by the brothers was sponsored by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, named for the founder of Interface Carpets, an Atlanta-based company that has promoted biomimicry solutions for industry.