A review on bioinspired strategies for an energy-efficient built environment

Energy efficiency is an emerging challenge for the built environment due to rapid urbanisation. The built environment impacts human health and comfort, along with generating greenhouse gas emissions that deteriorate the climate. The development of bioinspired strategies is an evolving topic and is recently gaining popularity for effectuation in the built environment. At present, the existing reviews are conducted primarily to cover niche themes, which leads to a lack of holistic and multidisciplinary overview. Therefore, a detailed analysis is presented in this study to understand the current trends and research gaps in achieving an energy-efficient built environment. An organised assessment of the performance and effectuation of the bioinspired strategies is carried out using systematic analysis (in four steps). Bibliometric analysis is also performed based on the output generated from multiple searches, which are divided into two scales: Building and Urban, resulting in 906 and 146 documents, respectively. It is observed that the existing research focuses on material-related (structural analysis and development) topics primarily, and limited emphasis is devoted to thermal analysis. Furthermore, studies on achieving high solar reflectance envelope surfaces and integrated thermophysical properties are found to be limited. This study also observed that the form and ecosystem level of bioinspiration needs additional focus. Furthermore, the energy efficiency of strategies in heating dominant climates needs to be adequately covered. The technology readiness level of the bioinspired strategies is also analysed.