Urban Green Roof

Green roofs may provide one solution.

Urban green roof.

Creating low maintenance terrestrial naturalistic green spaces in the urban core is not popular. One of the additional benefits of urban green roofs for agriculture is that they inevitably enhance urban biodiversity. Green roofs are covered with growing media and vegetation that enable rainfall infiltration and evapotranspiration of stored water. Green roofs can provide both visually and physically accessible green space.

Furthermore it is roof level green space that is accessible to the local community. Green roofs are one of the most effective ways to reduce the ambient air temperature in urban areas. They are particularly cost effective in dense urban areas where land values are high and on large industrial or office buildings where stormwater management costs are likely to be high. During summer the temperatures in cities are approximately 5 7 c higher than in the countryside due to buildings and roads heat absorption and the temperature on the traditional roof can be up to 40 c higher compared to the green roof.

Studies have documented that invertebrate communities can live on a variety of green roofs in several countries. Building urban resilience illustrates the processes undertaken to develop this new knowledge and thereby embed a deeper level of understanding in readers illustrative case studies and exemplars are drawn from countries outside of the core researched areas to demonstrate the application of the knowledge more broadly.