Covering the Gap for an Effective Energy and Environmental Design of Green Roofs: Contributions from Experimental and Modelling Researches

Abstract

Green roofs are components of the building envelope that have become increasingly popular in urban contexts because other than providing numerous environmental benefts they are also capable of reducing building energy consumption, especially in summer. However, despite all these advantages, green roofs are still affected by some limitations. Specifcally, there are some gaps affecting the energy modelling consisting in the absence of a proper database, information (growth stage, leaf area index, and coverage ratio) relative to the different green roof plant species, which technicians could use in case of lack of actual feld data to perform energy analysis of buildings equipped with green roofs. These gaps concern also environmental and economic assessments of such technology. In fact, the currently available green roof LCA and LCC studies seem to underestimate the role of the substrate on the overall environmental impact and the role of the disposal phase on the life cycle cost of the green roof. In this chapter, all these aspects are addressed, and contributions to their solution, which arose from both experimental and modelling research, carried out by the authors are presented.