The goals are ambitious and the negotiations are delicate, but even at the highest levels of COP26, nature offers us models to learn from.
When the leaders of nations and businesses who are gathered in Glasgow at COP26 listen to nature, they seem to be hearing the complaints nature is making about sky-high carbon emissions and climate change.
What they seem to be missing all too often is the counsel nature offers for finding sustainable solutions to those challenges.
That counsel includes countless points of inspiration for technological innovations to replace the use of fossil fuels, but it also offers deep guidance on more ineffable goals like mobilizing finance and working together.
As our co-founder Janine Benyus said during an event at The New York Times Climate Hub, nature’s patterns and processes can show us ways to make any human activities and systems more sustainable, and more supportive of the rest of the living community.
In this collection, we offer a selection of biological strategies that can inform efforts to meet each of the four stated goals of COP26. They are starting points and leads that can point in many other directions. Where will they take you?
