Around the world, scientists and engineers are coming together to join in the fight against global climate change and ecological destruction. It's a monumental task, and progress is coming from some unexpected directions-including architecture. Here are just a few incredible ways that modern building methods are saving the environment. 

Incorporating Renewable Energy

Quite possibly the greatest advancement in the fight to end global warming is the rapid progress being made in renewable energy. Expect to see future buildings incorporating solar panels or wind turbines as a simple matter of course. This serves a dual purpose: It reduces the carbon footprint of the building as well as its dependency on the energy grid, which in turn maximizes its resiliency in a crisis. Incorporating renewables in this kind of decentralized, structure-by-structure fashion is being made possible by plummeting costs. In 2017, the cost of commercial-scale solar energy production fell to $0.11 per kilowatt-hour. As the price of oil continues its run of instability, using renewables to power our infrastructure is just a matter of efficiency. 

Becoming More Efficient

Green building practices are fundamentally focused on efficiency, and approach the issue holistically, making sure that every aspect of the design takes efficient resource use into account. Rating systems, such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards in the US, provide tools for gauging the environmental impacts of a building (carbon emissions, construction material toxicity, heat loss, etc.) in a quantitative way. This allows engineers to use building information modeling (BIM) programs to minimize the ecological impact and maximize the economic output of any structure. The use of green building materials to craft the structures themselves is helping this process of optimization. In other words, as our technologies become more advanced, our buildings will become more sustainable. 

Adopting Biophilic Design

Biophilia literally means a love of life, but what does that mean in building terms? It means directly incorporating living things into the design of a living or working space in order to enhance the quality of life for inhabitants. A good example of this is Amazon's Spheres building in Seattle, which incorporates over 40,000 plants. A groundbreaking NASA study showed that certain houseplants as innocuous as the Pot Mum and Gerber Daisy were effective at removing toxic chemicals like formaldehyde from the air. Plant roots and their associated microorganisms have even been shown to destroy pathogens. The moving water used to irrigate those plants generates negative ions, which have been shown to positively affect human moods. The point is that seeing humanity as an integral part of nature, not something separate, is a healthy choice for ourselves and the planet. 

Mimicking Natural Processes

Some architects are taking this idea a step further by mimicking natural processes in the construction of artificial things. Appropriately enough, this is called biomimicry and represents the cutting edge of green design. The company Blue Planet, for example, combines carbon dioxide from flue gas with calcium in order to create cement; this is the same process used in the ocean by coral to build their skeletons. The Japanese Bullet train was built to emulate the shape of a bird's beak for maximum aerodynamic efficiency. The core of the philosophy is that nature, through a multi-billion-year process, has already refined certain systems like structural stability to near-maximum through evolution and natural selection. Emulating nature is simply one more logical design choice. 

Where we live has a huge impact on how we live. When we live in the ways that nature intended, it leads to a better quality of life for not only the planet but for everyone sharing it.