Green roofs and why the UK needs to get up to speed

There are some incredible examples around the world of buildings already doing this well, from eight level rooftop gardens in Japan to a 10,000m² living roof on the top of the California Academy of Sciences in America.

The Vancouver Convention Centre in British Columbia has a 24,000m² roof and is one of the 10 largest green roofs in the world. Even the roof of Gap’s headquarters in California is covered in native indigenous grasses and wildflowers cultivated from native grasslands.

Here in the UK, you can spot an intensive green roof on some large commercial buildings such as New Providence Wharf in Docklands, which covers an area of 8.3ha. It’s one of around 700 green roofs in central London.

Closer to our studio in Cheshire, Chester Bus Interchange was designed with a green roof to help to improve air quality, biodiversity and wildlife in the city centre as well as reducing the effect of the drainage run off on the sewer network.

Green roofs are starting to gain popularity in the UK, but we need to speed up and catch up with other European cities who have been making them part of the urban landscape for decades.

We could learn a lot from Stuttgart in Germany, which is considered to be the ‘green roof capital of Europe’. This is mainly down to a forward-thinking government and their enhanced environmental policies. Many of its municipalities are using regulations to make green roofs mandatory, so it’s little wonder that they have become an accepted standard in the building industry.

In the UK, the environmental regulations in the building sector aren’t well accepted and it’s why cities have been left to develop individual policies. One of the reasons why London is home to much of the UK’s green roof market is because the London Plan has doubled the use of green roofs since 2008. Cities outside of the capital should take note.

There are “living labs” at both the Universities of Sheffield and Salford, which are helping to establish precedent to convince developers and investors to adopt green roofs and show the benefits these can bring but government environmental policies are required to drive this. Perhaps the new Biodiversity Net Gain regulations that have come in this month could help with the push for the green roof on inner city developments.

We certainly need more green roofs. Urban densification is rapidly eroding our green spaces and in order to have sustainable and resilient cities in the future, nature reintegration is essential.

How do we do it? Unused roof spaces could contribute to the solution, but only if projects include green/blue roofs in their specification right from the start. Too often, photovoltaic panels or other renewable energy technologies take favour, but why can’t we have both?

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