by Michael Smith
London's best way to demonstrate visibly its commitment to the environment when the world looks its way in the run up to the 2012 Olympics would be, according to the opinion of Richard Blakeway, a sea of green roofs.
Richard Blakeway, environmental advisor to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, suggested this when he spoke at the World Green Roofs Congress in the capital on Wednesday.
He spoke of the projected growth of London in the next years and its need to provide homes for a million more inhabitants by 2018.
Mr. Blakeway said that the authorities have got to ensure is that as many as possible of these new buildings have green roofs.
According to him the Mayor has very much put green roofs at the centre of his climate change adaptation policy and his policy to greening the city.
London would and could learn from other cities, he added, where incentives are put in place to encourage green roofs, whether these be carrot, stick or a combination of both.
To this one can but only say that we use too much of the stick with regards to green ventures in this country; we need more of the carrot, much more in fact.
Outlining the many advantages of green roofs the Mayor's advisor said they would reduce the urban heat island effect, encourage biodiversity, control flooding and urban drainage, provide a valuable public green spaces in an ever-more-densely populated city and even save money.
As energy prices continue to skyrocket, he said, the added insulation from green roofs can help keep bills down.
A green roof scheme in Canary Wharf saves the building's owners over £5,000 a year, he said, while Toronto reports annual savings of up to $22m from its green roofs and the figure in Chicago, a city which has embraced the idea, are around £100m.
He said City Hall was currently working on planning guidance that would make green roofs more attractive to developers, and argued that they could be affordable on everything from social housing to riverside penthouses.
The concept of pushing green roofs is in keeping with the emerging flavour of Mr Johnson's environmental policy, which favours promoting improvements to the capitals open spaces and tree planting over technical carbon-based fixes that the public can sometimes struggle to understand.
While green roofs do all of that what the advisor to the Mayor of London said, e.g. that they would reduce the urban heat island effect, encourage biodiversity, control flooding and urban drainage, provide a valuable public green spaces in an ever-more-densely populated city and even save money, in order to really improve the drainage situation, however, in town and countryside, to fight flash floods and such, we must put a stop to the concreting over of all the front yards and such.
© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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London to showcase green roofs
