A green roof is also a garden and is increasingly important in minimizing the impact of buildings that have been built or are to be built, thereby minimizing their environmental impact.

Integrated into ecological planning and sustainable development strategies, they contribute passively to achieving comfortable environments inside buildings, reducing energy consumption and allowing buildings to adapt to their surroundings.

Green Roftops

Associating green roofs with built elements has a number of benefits, not only environmental, but also economic and socio-communal. Some of these benefits are felt on the scale of the building, others will only have an impact on the scale of the municipality or city.

Environmental benefits

We have identified those that we easily associate with increasing green areas in an urban context, such as oxygen production, carbon capture, filtering toxic dust, creating habitats, increasing biodiversity, reducing heat island and greenhouse effects.

However, there are other important environmental issues such as rainwater management. Here the role of green roofs is twofold:

• Reducing the amount of water that reaches the drainage systems.
• Delaying the arrival of water in drainage systems.

In this way, the implementation of green roofs on a large/medium scale could reduce or prevent flooding phenomena.

Green Roof –  Douro Valley House

Economic benefits

The protection of waterproofing is one of the most important. Contrary to popular belief, waterproofing sheets will have a longer service life when a green roof is installed on the building. This is because the sheets are not subject to thermal variations and the action of the sun’s rays, due to the insulating nature of the green roof system.

Another issue of great importance is thermal insulation, the huge increase in energy efficiency that green roofs bring to buildings.

The economic benefits include:

• Energy efficiency: reducing the cost of heating and cooling buildings Due to the thermal properties of green roofing systems, we can consider this technology as a passive energy efficiency technique in building construction.
• Increased service life of the waterproofing membrane: the results of various studies show that green roofing systems protect waterproofing membranes against damage caused by thermal amplitudes, such as cracking and lamination, and against mechanical damage.

Firstly, it can be concluded that green roof systems can contribute to the good performance of buildings and improve the quality of urban environments as long as they are adjusted to the specific area and climatic situation of each location. Each green roof project will have its own specific requirements: programmatic, design and maintenance.

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