Address at the Institution of Engineering & Technology on the occasion of the World Environment Day, 5th June 2026
Ajay Mathur
Professor of Public Policy, IIT Delhi & Former DG, ISA
Good morning, esteemed colleagues, fellows, and honored guests of the Institution of Engineering & Technology. It is an extraordinary privilege to stand before you on World Environment Day.
When engineers gather to discuss the climate crisis, our collective instinct is to look forward. We look to the bleeding edge of carbon capture technology, the next iteration of solid-state battery chemistry, or quantum computing algorithms designed to optimize logistics networks. We treat the climate crisis as a massive, multi-variable optimization problem—which it is. We approach it with the toolkits we were taught: thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, stress analysis, and computational modeling.
But today, I want to challenge the direction of our gaze. Under our theme this year, “Inspired by Nature: For Climate and For Our Future,” I invite you to realize that while we are frantically trying to invent our way out of ecological collapse, we are surrounded by a library of solutions that have already been open-sourced.
As engineers, we take pride in our rigorous testing phases. A five-year aerospace testing pipeline is considered thorough. A decade-long clinical trial for a medical device is exhaustive.
But nature has been running an uninterrupted, global research and development laboratory for 3.8 billion years. In this laboratory, the boundary conditions have been brutal. The energy inputs have been strictly constrained to current solar income. The material inputs have been limited to the elements available on the crust of the earth and within the atmosphere. The penalty for poor design, structural inefficiency, or energy waste was not a revoked patent or a bankrupt startup—the penalty was absolute extinction.
The failures became fossils. The successes are the living ecosystems that wrap around our planet today.
Historically, human engineering has operated on an extractive and conquering mindset. We dammed rivers to prove we could tame fluid flow; we burned fossilized dense energy stores to brute-force our way through thermodynamic limits; we manufactured toxic, synthetic polymers because it was convenient.
But as we sit in 2026, witnessing erratic global weather patterns, supply chain vulnerabilities, and escalating carbon thresholds, we must admit that our extractive paradigm has hit a hard thermodynamic wall. The next era of technology cannot be about conquering nature. It must be about emulating it. We must transition from an era of industrial extraction to an era of biological emulation—a field we formally call biomimicry.
Let us begin where much of classical engineering begins: with the laws of motion and fluid dynamics. One of our most critical weapons against climate change is the rapid scaling of renewable energy, specifically wind and tidal power. Yet, as all of within the IET know well, our current mechanical designs face inherent aerodynamic and hydrodynamic limitations.
Consider the standard wind turbine blade. To maximize lift and minimize drag, we have spent decades refining smooth, perfectly contoured airfoils. However, these smooth blades suffer from a severe engineering bottleneck: stall. When the angle of attack becomes too steep, air separates from the upper surface of the blade, creating massive turbulence, dropping efficiency to zero, and placing destructive mechanical stress on the turbine hub.
Now, let us look at the biological analog: the Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Here is a creature weighing up to 40 metric tons, navigating underwater environments with astonishing agility. It can perform tight, acrobatic loops to catch prey—loops that should be hydrodynamically impossible for an animal of its mass.
The answer lies in the design of the whale’s flippers. For years, marine biologists were baffled by the leading edges of the whale’s pectoral flippers. They aren’t smooth. They are covered in large, jagged, uneven bumps called tubercles.
To a classical aerodynamicist, adding bumps to the leading edge of a wing looks like architectural heresy. It looks like you are intentionally introducing drag. But when aeronautical engineers finally modeled these tubercles in wind tunnels and through computational fluid dynamics (CFD), they discovered something revolutionary.
As fluid passes over the bumpy leading edge, it is channeled into high-velocity vortices between the tubercles. This vortex generation keeps the boundary layer of air or water attached to the top surface of the blade for much longer, even at incredibly steep angles.
By applying this bio-inspired design to wind turbine blades—a field pioneered by companies like WhalePower—engineers have achieved:
● A 32% reduction in aerodynamic drag
● An 8% increase in maximum lift
● The ability to generate electricity at wind speeds 20% lower than conventional turbines
By mimicking the whale, we didn’t just make an eco-friendly turbine; we optimized fluid dynamics past the limits of our previous models. We expanded the operational envelope of renewable energy, allowing turbines to produce power in low-wind areas that were previously deemed economically unviable.
We see the same principle applied to tidal energy. Fluid currents in the ocean are highly turbulent and multidirectional. Traditional rotary tidal turbines suffer from immense mechanical fatigue due to these constantly shifting forces. In response, engineers looked at the schooling behavior of fish. When fish swim in a tightly packed school, they don’t fight the turbulence created by the fish in front of them. They utilize it. They alter their body mechanics to capture the shed vortices, actually extracting kinetic energy from the turbulent water to propel themselves forward.
By arranging vertical-axis wind and tidal turbines in a counter-rotating configuration that mimics a school of fish, we can increase the power density of a wind or tidal farm by up to ten times compared to conventional, widely spaced horizontal-axis layouts. Nature shows us that turbulence is not an enemy to be avoided; it is a structured energy source to be harvested.
Let us pivot from energy generation to energy consumption. The built environment—our cities, offices, and factories—is responsible for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions. A staggering portion of this energy is lost through the brute-force thermal regulation of buildings: running high-voltage HVAC systems to keep interiors cool during summer and warm during winter. Our current engineering paradigm isolates a building from its environment using insulation, and then uses massive electrical inputs to fight the external ambient temperature. Nature, conversely, views a building as a dynamic, breathing membrane.
The classic, yet profoundly relevant case study here takes us to the African savannah, to look at the architectural marvels built by macrotermes termites. These tiny insects construct mounds that stand several meters high. The external environment of the African savannah is brutal, with ambient temperatures swinging from 50 degrees Celsius during the day down to near-freezing at night. Yet, inside the deepest chambers of the mound, where the termites tend to their delicate fungus gardens, the temperature remains rock-solid at approximately 30 degrees Celsius, with humidity fixed at 60%. They achieve this without a single watt of electricity, without a single compressor, and without any synthetic refrigerants. How? Through passive, convective structural engineering.
The termite mound is designed with a complex network of internal flues, chimneys, and low-level vents. The termites constantly open and close these vents throughout the day. As the sun beats down on the mound, the solar heat drives a thermal siphon. Warm, stale air inside the mound rises and escapes through the central chimney, while cooler air is drawn in from the base of the mound, passing over subterranean tunnels that are cooled by the earth.
When architect Mick Pearce collaborated with engineering firm Arup to design the Eastgate Centre—a massive mid-rise office and retail complex in Harare, Zimbabwe—they threw out the traditional HVAC blueprint. Instead, they built a concrete structure based entirely on the passive design of the termite mound. The Eastgate Centre utilizes a building envelope with high thermal mass to absorb heat during the day. By itself, this design did not work, and so a new feature was added: low power fans, which draw cool air through the building at night, flushing the heat out through vertical chimneys.
The engineering metrics of this bio-inspired building are astonishing:
● It uses 90% less energy for ventilation than a conventional building of its size.
● It saved 3.5 million dollars in upfront capital costs because the developers didn’t need to purchase a massive chiller plant.
● Those savings were passed directly to the tenants, with rents that are significantly lower than neighboring, conventionally cooled high-rises.
But we can go even deeper into thermal management. Look at the Saharan Silver Ant (Cataglyphis bombycina). This creature foraging on the desert floor in temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. It survives thanks to a dense coating of uniquely shaped, triangular-cross-section hairs. These hairs don’t just insulate the ant; they perform two distinct optical functions: they are highly reflective in the visible and near-infrared spectrums, and they are highly emissive in the mid-infrared spectrum.
This means the ant’s coat acts as a passive radiative cooling system. It reflects the sun’s energy away while simultaneously dumping the ant’s internal body heat directly into the cold void of deep space through the atmospheric transparency window.
Engineers have now synthesized optical coatings and paints that mimic this triangular micro-structure. When applied to the roofs of factories and data centers, these bio-inspired radiative cooling meta-materials can drop the surface temperature of a building by up to 10 degrees Celsius below the ambient air temperature under direct sunlight, requiring zero energy input. This is the future of cooling: not mechanical compression, but optical engineering inspired by biology.
As structural and materials engineers within the IET know all too well, our climate crisis is fundamentally bound to our materials crisis. Even if we completely decarbonized our electricity grid tomorrow, the chemical processes we use to manufacture our foundational materials—steel, glass, plastics, and concrete—are fundamentally unsustainable.
Let us focus on concrete. The production of ordinary Portland cement is responsible for roughly 8% of global CO2 emissions. The process requires firing limestone and clay in kilns to 1,450 degrees Celsius, a process that releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide from both the burning of fossil fuels and the chemical calcination reaction of the limestone itself.
Now, let us ask a fundamental engineering question: How does nature build stone?
If you dive into the ocean and look at a coral reef, or hold a simple marine bivalve shell, you are looking at a structure that is mechanically superior to concrete in tensile and compressive strength. Yet, a mollusk does not ignite a kiln. It does not heat its environment to 1,400 degrees. It operates entirely at ambient sea temperature, in highly diluted aqueous solutions.
The mollusk utilizes proteins to template the crystallization of dissolved calcium and carbonate ions floating in seawater, capturing seawater carbon dioxide and turning it into solid, highly ordered calcium carbonate. It uses carbon as a structural asset, not an atmospheric liability.
Companies founded by visionary civil and chemical engineers—such as Blue Planet and CarbiCrete—have commercialized this exact process. By bubbling industrial flue gas through mineral-rich wastewater, they mimic the marine mineralization process. They precipitate synthetic limestone at room temperature. The resulting aggregate and cement alternatives don’t just achieve “net-zero” carbon; they are carbon-negative. For every ton of bio-inspired concrete produced, up to 440 kilograms of CO2 are permanently sequestered from the atmosphere, locked away into the structural foundations of our roads, bridges, and buildings for centuries.
Let us look at another material challenge: synthetic plastics. Our oceans are choking on petrochemical polymers because we designed them for a linear lifecycle—we engineered them to be cheap to produce and virtually indestructible, ignoring their end-of-life parameters.
Nature, meanwhile, is a master polymer chemist. Consider Chitin, the second most abundant natural polymer on Earth, found in the exoskeletons of insects, crustacean shells, and the cell walls of fungi. Chitin is remarkably tough, flexible, and serves as an excellent barrier material. Yet, when an insect molts or a crab dies, that chitinous shell degrades completely into harmless, nutrient-rich organic components within days, broken down by naturally occurring enzymes.
Engineers at institutions like the Wyss Institute at Harvard have developed “Shrilk”—a fully biodegradable material composed of chitin from discarded shrimp shells and a silk protein derived from fibroin. Shrilk exhibits the mechanical strength and toughness of aluminum alloys, yet it possesses a fraction of the weight, and it biodegrades completely in a backyard compost heap within three weeks.
This is the design directive for the 21st-century materials engineer: we must stop synthesizing materials that are alien to the earth’s chemical recycling loops. If nature cannot digest it, we should not be manufacturing it at scale.
So far, we have looked at individual components: a whale-inspired blade, a termite-inspired building, a coral-inspired concrete. These highlight the improvements to existing technology – in fluid flow, in heat transfer, and in materials management – through biomimicry. But as members of the IET, we are systems thinkers. We know that optimizing an isolated component means nothing if the broader system is fundamentally broken. The ultimate lesson nature offers us is not found under a microscope or inside a wind tunnel; it is found when we map the entire system architecture of an ecosystem.
A marvellous example of systems thinking as far as the use of biomimicry is concerned, happened the redesign of the Shinkansen – and I need to thank Mr Chauhan, who is the current chairman of the Delhi chapter of IET, and who invited me here, for this lead.
It has led to me to believe that the redesign of Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train (specifically the 500 Series introduced in the late 1990s) to be possibly the most celebrated example of biomimicry
In the early 1990s, the Shinkansen faced a severe engineering bottleneck: noise pollution. As the trains accelerated to 300 km/h, they encountered the “tunnel boom” phenomenon. As you are aware, when a fast train enters a narrow tunnel, it pushes a wall of air ahead of it, creating an atmospheric shockwave. When this wave exits the other end of the tunnel, it produces a loud, thunderous boom that disturbed nearby residential areas, violating Japan’s strict environmental noise standards.
Eiji Nakatsu, the general manager of the technical development department and an avid birdwatcher, realized that nature had already solved the physics of transitioning seamlessly between fluid mediums of different densities. His team integrated three distinct avian adaptations into the train’s redesign.
The most striking visual change was the nose of the train. Nakatsu observed the kingfisher, a bird that dives from the air (a low-density medium) into water (a high-density medium) at high speeds with barely a splash. The kingfisher’s beak is perfectly wedge-shaped, with a diamond-shaped cross-section that gradually increases in size from the tip to the head. This geometry allows fluid to flow smoothly around it rather than being pushed forward as a shockwave.
The second example of biomimicry that Nakatsu’s team adopted was in the redesign of the pantograph. This too had become a major source of aerodynamic noise, generating a loud rushing sound caused by Von Kármán vortices (swirling eddies of air created behind a moving structure). Nakatsu’s team looked to the owl, the quietest avian predator, capable of silent flight to surprise prey. Upon analyzing owl feathers under a microscope, they discovered tiny serrations (called fimbriae) along the leading edges. These micro-structures break up large, noisy air vortices into smaller, micro-vortices, effectively muffling the sound. The engineers added similar serrations—termed “vortex generators”—to the main structure of the pantograph. This effectively broke up the air currents and brought the noise level down well within the legal limits.
However, even after quietening the pantograph itself, the supporting base structure still created significant drag and wind noise. For a solution, the engineering team looked to the Adelie penguin. Penguins spend their lives moving effortlessly through water, a highly viscous fluid. The smooth, spindle-shaped body of the Adelie penguin allows it to glide with minimal drag. The engineers redesigned the supporting pedestal of the pantograph to mirror this sleek, hydrodynamic shape, further smoothing the airflow and lowering wind resistance.
These three redesign features together totally eliminated the problem of noise pollution; the noise created by the Shinkansen was well within the Japanese residential noise limits. JR West achieved remarkable results:
• Shockwave Elimination: The aerodynamic profile eliminated the tunnel boom by letting air flow smoothly past the nose.
• Efficiency Gains: Air resistance was reduced by 30%.
• Energy Reduction: Power consumption dropped by 15%, even while the train operated at higher speeds.
Human industry operates almost exclusively on a linear “Take-Make-Waste” topology. We extract resources, we process them into short-lived goods, and we discard the byproducts as pollution. It is a open-loop system, and in a finite thermodynamic sandbox like planet Earth, open-loop systems are inherently unstable over long time horizons.
In an old-growth forest or a mature coral reef, the system topology is completely different. It is a closed-loop network of loops within loops. The conceptual category of “waste” simply does not exist. The output stream of one subsystem is the mandatory input feedstock for an adjacent subsystem. A fallen log is not garbage; it is the energy source for fungal networks, which in turn unlock phosphorus and nitrogen for the roots of surrounding trees.
We must apply this ecosystem architecture to our industrial clusters through a discipline known as industrial symbiosis.
A spectacular, real-world manifestation of this engineering philosophy exists in the eco-industrial park of Kalundborg, Denmark. Decades ago, the engineers running the various facilities in Kalundborg realized that they could drastically cut costs and emissions by interlinking their waste and energy streams. In Kalundborg:
● A local oil refinery produces excess gas that was historically flared off. Today, that gas is captured, scrubbed, and piped directly to power a nearby power station and a plasterboard manufacturing plant.
● The power station produces high-temperature residual steam. Instead of venting that thermal energy into the atmosphere via cooling towers, the steam is piped to heat 5,000 local homes, as well as a massive pharmaceutical plant and an aquaculture fish farm.
● The fly ash from the power plant’s scrubbers is captured and sent to a cement factory, replacing raw limestone feedstock.
● The pharmaceutical plant produces nutrient-rich sludge from its fermentation tanks, which is treated and distributed to local farms as organic fertilizer, replacing energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers.
This is not a collection of companies doing corporate social responsibility charity work. This is a highly optimized, resilient, profitable industrial ecosystem. The physical proximity of these industries creates a web of mutual economic dependence that mimics a biological food web.
When we design our smart grids, our manufacturing hubs, and our urban infrastructure, we must map them as interconnected ecosystems. We must ensure that the thermal waste of a data center feeds the district heating of a residential zone; that the chemical byproduct of a water treatment plant becomes the catalyst for an adjacent chemical manufacturing process.
My fellow engineers, fellows, and colleagues of the IET, we stand at a profound historical crossroads.
For over two centuries, the prestige of our profession – the engineering profession – was measured by our ability to dominate the physical world. The engineering heroes of the past were those who built the loudest engines, blasted tunnels through the most formidable mountains, and erected monolithic structures that defied local ecosystems. We looked at nature as a chaotic force to be subdued, tamed, and exploited.
But the metrics of engineering excellence have fundamentally shifted. The climate reality of 2026 demands a new definition of technological genius.
The most sophisticated engineer of our era is not the one who can build a machine that consumes the most power to alter an environment. The most sophisticated engineer is the one who can design a system so elegant, so highly integrated, and so deeply informed by biological principles that it fulfills human needs while leaving the surrounding ecosystem completely undisturbed—or actively regenerated.
To achieve this, we must break down the rigid disciplinary silos that have isolated our profession for too long. We cannot afford to have mechanical, electrical, and software engineers working in a vacuum, completely divorced from the biological sciences.
We must bring biologists, ecologists, and soil scientists into our engineering design studios. We must make biomimicry a foundational, core curriculum in our engineering universities—taught right alongside fluid mechanics, finite element analysis, and systems control theory. We must learn to look at a leaf not just as a beautiful piece of botany, but as a masterpiece of optoelectronic energy conversion. We must look at a mycelial network not just as a mushroom, but as a decentralized, self-healing communication and logistics architecture.
The deadline we are facing to resolve the climate crisis is non-negotiable. The atmospheric carbon budgets are ticking down, and the planetary boundaries are real. We do not have the time to spend the next two centuries discovering solutions through blind trial and error.
And the truth is, we don’t have to. The solutions are already here. They are written in the open-source code of the living world—tested through deep time, refined through millions of generations, and completely optimized for the long-term survival of this planet.
I would suggest that it is the mandate of the Institution of Engineering & Technology to read that code, to understand its mathematical and physical principles, and to scale it into the industrial realities of tomorrow.
Let us step forward into this new era of engineering. Let us build a future where our technology does not destroy our ecology, but rather, emerges directly from it.
Let us be inspired by nature—not just for the sake of our environment, but for the elevation of our engineering profession, and for the security of our collective future. We need to help our community to move from the existing “extractive engineering” to the new “emulative engineering”.
Thank you very much.
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