Can Plant-Covered Buildings Cool Things Down?
Sourced from Jewish Journal
You don’t realize how small you are until you find yourself walking on a sidewalk in the middle of a city surrounded by hundreds, thousands, and often millions of people, and it’s hard to conceptually fathom the amount of people living, breathing, and working in that city, isn’t it? But everything you do whether its cleaning dishes in your apartment, throwing away less than a week’s worth of garbage, turning on the air conditioner, or driving to and from work, there are hundreds of thousands––even millions––of others doing the exact same thing, thereby generating an enormous cumulative, concentrated impact to the environment.
Currently, the world’s population stands at a staggering 7.8 billion people, and more than half of those people, approximately 55%, are living in concentrated urban centers, or cities. The global population is even projected to grow by an additional 2 billion or so persons by 2050, and by that time, experts predict 68% of the population will take up residence in cities. Israel already exemplifies this trend to the extreme as 92% of Israelis presently live throughout the country’s many cities and towns.
With the climate crisis looming over us, the vast majority of scientists conclude that our anthropogenic activities have undoubtedly accelerated the rate of climate change and that our nonstop population growth only intensifies this trend. Solving this existential crisis therefore requires well-placed restorative actions and initiatives to reverse course, and what better place to start implementing change than the areas that host the most people and generate the most pollution? Cities.
This has given credence to the idea to transform cities into sustainable ones to combat the effects of climate change more effectively, particularly the urban heat island effect in which cities become many degrees hotter than their rural outskirts because of the lack of green spaces and the abundance of heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt that are used in virtually all aspects of urban infrastructure. As a result, this spawns greater energy costs for cooling, compounds concentrated urban air pollution, and prompts greater amounts of heat-related illnesses and mortality.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
