It’s Only Up From Here !
How Green Roofs Will Contribute to Vancouver’s Green City Initiatives
Whether you live in Vancouver, or visit occasionally, you can see it’s expansion right before your eyes. What you might not realize are all the things going on behind the scenes to ensure that the city’s growth comes with a positive impact for our planet.
Green spaces are an essential piece to ensuring our carbon footprint is as low as possible, and Vancouver is picking up on that. However, it’s difficult to create new green spaces within established infrastructure. Enter: Green Roofs. A way to create new green spaces on either pre-existing or brand-new buildings, helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions and find creative ways to keep the city earth friendly.
Green Building Design – A Direct Response to Climate Change
Designing buildings with “green design” in mind is a great way to keep Vancouver’s carbon footprint as small as possible. Green roofs are a tool for this. Putting green roofs into a building’s design is a great way to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
The power of green roofs doesn’t stop there. Green roofs can help with flooding by absorbing excess rainwater which in turn reduces pressure on stormwater management systems. This is vital here in the Pacific Northwest (as we all know it can get rainy here every once in a while). Green roofs also help provide nice cool spaces and reduce heat in surrounding areas, ensuring cooler buildings during the hot summer months. Love bees and the beautiful flowers/plants they help pollinate? Green roofs help them too by providing sanctuaries for pollinators.
Green Space Access for All
Green roofs aren’t just about creating a positive impact on the planet but also the people who have access to them. Residents having access to a green space within a 5-minute walk is a goal that the City of Vancouver is working hard to reach. Cities can drastically improve the overall health of residents by providing easily accessible green spaces where people can relax and connect socially. As mentioned above, this can be difficult when you have already established infrastructure. Green roofs can provide a green space for residents within a quick elevator ride or walk up the stairs.
Green space access has been proven to boost mental and physical wellbeing, making it an essential piece of a happy city. You can’t make it any easier to get outside and enjoy natural beauty than putting it right on top of homes and businesses!
Taking “Local” to the Next Level
Speaking of physical wellbeing, having access to local produce can make eating healthy easier and more cost effective. Currently, local produce isn’t accessible for everyone in Vancouver. Using green roofs as community gardens will resolve this. A great example of a green roof garden is one in Toronto, Ontario at Ryerson University. This rooftop garden is 10,000 square feet and provides students at the school with fresh produce. Not only this, but the university is able to sell produce grown on the roof at local farmer’s markets resulting in an increase of funding for the program. This shows that having a rooftop garden won’t just provide produce for residents but also provide job opportunities or revenue for the buildings they are on. It’s a great way for local programs and communities to put their best foot forward!
Green roofs will be the way of the future for large cities like Vancouver, creating spaces for residents to soak in the sun, helping with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change as well as creating habitats for local species. The next time you’re in Vancouver and would like to see these green roofs in action, check out the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel and the Vancouver Convention Center. These are just a notable few, there are many others working their magic in the city, and many more to come!
