Harness nature-inspired design strategies to create fire-adapted buildings and protect vulnerable communities from the escalating threat of extreme wildfires.
Wildfire is no longer a remote or exceptional risk. Across many regions, changing climate conditions, expanding development patterns, and increasing pressure at the wildland-urban interface are exposing communities, infrastructure, and the built environment to more frequent and severe fire events. For architects, planners, and designers, wildfire resilience can no longer be treated solely as a technical compliance issue. It is increasingly becoming a fundamental design consideration that influences how buildings, landscapes, and settlements are conceived, planned, and delivered.
Traditional wildfire mitigation strategies have often focused on resisting fire once risk has already materialised. However, resilient design requires a broader understanding of how fire interacts with ecosystems, urban form, infrastructure networks, human behaviour, and long-term recovery processes. By studying fire-adapted landscapes and ecological systems, designers can develop more integrated approaches that strengthen resilience before, during, and after wildfire events.
This session explores how bio-inspired and systems-based design principles can be applied to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban development in fire-prone environments. Participants will gain practical insight into site planning, building design, material selection, landscape strategies, community-scale resilience, and adaptive design approaches that support safer, more resilient, and ecologically responsive built environments.
Key Topics Discussed:
Founder/Director
Dr. Melissa Sterry PhD, PGCert, BA (Hons), CSci, FIScT, FDRS is a chartered scientist, design scientist, complex systems theorist and internationally recognised authority on nature-inspired design for wildfire resilience. Creator of the pyrophytic design paradigm, her research examines how the biochemistries, structures, behaviours and ecologies of fire-adapted species can inform resilient and regenerative architecture, urbanism, infrastructure and planning for wildfire-prone environments. Her work synthesises expertise from fire ecology, the wider fire sciences, biomimetics, engineering, materials science and ecological systems theory to develop innovative approaches for designing communities that coexist with wildfire. Dr. Sterry holds a PhD from the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group at the University of Greenwich, where her research advanced biomimicry beyond individual organisms to ecosystem-scale design. Her work has been published in leading academic volumes, including the Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking and Smart Design Thinking in Architecture and Urbanism, and she is currently developing a new generation of bio-inspired wildfire sensing, materials and adaptive infrastructure technologies. She is the founder and director of the wildfire research and publishing platform Panarchic Codex® and of the Design for Wildfire school, and its laboratory the Firescape Lab. Her wider responsibilities include founder and director of Bio-innovation agency Bioratorium®. A Fellow of both the Institute of Science and Technology and the Design Research Society, and a chartered scientist with the Science Council, Dr. Sterry also serves on expert advisory, scientific review and editorial panels internationally. She has advised organisations including the World Bank, Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), Future Cities Catapult and the Canadian Institute of Planners, while delivering keynote lectures and executive education worldwide.
