Green Roofs for Singapore

It is not uncommon to see green roofs in Europe, and increasingly in North American cities, many city governments have also implemented demonstration projects to raise the awareness and evaluate the environmental benets of green roofs. The motivating factors for promoting green roofs are varied, ranging from ameliorating environmental problems within cities, to re-introducing biodiversity of ora and fauna, improving the aesthetics of cities, utilizing untapped space on roofs, and using green roofs to supplement traditional engineering solutions for the citys drainage system. The implementation of green roofs is often not attributable to one motivating factor or the other, but is usually the result of a complex interplay between economic, social and even political considerations in these cities. Increasingly, green roof advocates have also linked green roofs to biophilic design of buildings or public spaces, green building practices, smart growth of cities, and the general concept of sustainable cities. These cases perhaps reect the multiple contributions of urban greenery in the environmental, ecological, social and economic realms of cities, and the awareness that more often than not, there is insufcient greenery in the urban environment. From a range of studies conducted, it seems clear that with the growing interest in green roofs worldwide, efforts to green up roofs can only help correct the ecological imbalance and environmental problems brought about by excessive urbanization, and improve the quality of life of urban dwellers. For Singapore, the case to install more green roofs is strong. Land use in Singapore will increasingly be high-density and high-rise. There will be an inevitable impact on the physical environment and ambience of the Garden City painstakingly nurtured over the last 40 years, if we fail to allow greenery to keep pace with the increasing amount of concrete, glass and steel surfaces associated with increased land developments. A logical solution to the competition for space is to integrate greenery onto built structures, for instance on roofs, decks and even building facades.

Faade greenery in a building Tokyo (Copyright: Organization for Landscape and Urban Greenery Technology Development).

Green roof technology, given its lightweight feature and emphasis on creating self-sustaining communities that do not require intensivemaintenance, is a useful technology that can be used on many existing and new roofs in Singapore. With widespread implementation, not only will there be signicant greening of our high-rise environment, given the large number of buildings here, there will likely be improvements in the quality our physical environment, such as in the mitigation of the urban heat island effect. Data collected in Singapore have for instance, shown the potential of green roofs in reducing surface temperatures and hence heat trapped on walls or transmitted into building interior.

Concrete Plant covered surfaces

The infra-red image shows signicant temperature differences between greenery-covered surfaces of the green roofs compared to exposed sections.

Recent studies in Singapore have also shown that green roofs can help cut down the amount of glare arising from reection off a concrete roof, and even improve the quality of air in the immediate vicinity of the roof. Green roofs thus offer an innovative means to transform otherwise harsh

Increasing temperature

and barren roofs into attractive roofscapes that benet the environment, and introduce biodiversity back to the urban environment.

In addition to introducing ora into otherwise barren roofs, green roofs help to bring fauna back into the urban environment

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Plant Selection for Green Roofs in Singapore

In the use of green roof technology in Singapore, the biggest challenge and unknown factor inuencing the success of the green roof is the living component, i.e., the plants, especially for non-irrigated green roofs and those that employ shallow substrates of 10 cm or less. The other components of the green roofs are largely physical elements that can be engineered to meet specic performance criteria such as drainage rate, water and nutrient retention, etc., to suit prevailing climatic condition. On the other hand, since green roof research and implementation have largely been limited to temperate regions, there is currently a lack of information on the types of plants that are best adapted for green roof in the tropics. The use of appropriate plants is an important factor that inuences the amount of subsequent maintenance required, and which literally determines whether a green roof stays green. Plants also constitute the most basic factor that determines the look and feel of a green roof according to the imagination and creativity of landscape architects. Despite our high rainfall and humidity conditions, analysis of the daily atmospheric water decit in Singapore will show that water availability for plant is likely to be a key limiting factor for successful plant growth in non-irrigated green roofs. For instance, for the pilot green roof project conducted in Punggol, it was estimated that the number of occasions when the green roof substrate experienced depleted moisture levels continuously for four days or more occurred in eight out of the twelve months monitored. This will invariably result in considerable water stress for plants in the green roofs. Thus, despite our high annual rainfall and humidity, the non-uniformity in rainfall distribution and the limited water storage in shallow substrates will mean that green roofs in Singapore do experience xeric growth conditions.

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Plants that are drought-tolerant thus need to be used for non-irrigated green roofs. Obviously, if irrigation is provided for the green roof, the type of plants that can be used increases tremendously. The use of shallow substrate also imposes another limitation, in that because of limited anchorage, ground cover or low shrubs, rather than tall shrubs need to be used to prevent toppling of plants.

Many native wild owers or weeds on green roofs cannot tolerate 4-5 days without rainfall, compared to the more drought tolerant succulents.

Given that water is the key limiting factor of growth, a useful starting point for plant selection is knowledge of the physiological behaviour of plants towards water use. Plants that are drought tolerant would also tend to have high water use efciency, in that there is more carbon dioxide xed by the plants per unit loss of water from the leaves. A group of plants that has high water use efciency is those that employ the Crassulacean Acid

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Metabolism mode of photosynthesis, or CAM for short. These plants will close the stomata during daytime, when evaporative loss of water from the leaves tends to be greatest, and instead keep stomata open at night to absorb carbon dioxide for storage and use in photosynthesis during daytime. CAM plants should thus offer many potential candidates for green roof plants. Fortunately, CAM plants are very widespread, and are represented in thirty-three families encompassing 18,900 plant species. The huge diversity of CAM plants can be found in families such as Aizoceae, Agavaceae, Asclepiadaceae, Bromeliaceae, Cactaceae, Commelinaceae, Crassulaceae, Dracaenaceae, Lamiaceae, Orchidaceae, Piperaceae, Portulaceae, etc. For roofs that are less exposed, many tropical epiphytes and sclerophyllous plants in the families Orchidaceae, Bromeliaceae, Asclepiadeceae and Piperaceae will offer numerous possibilities. Undoubtedly, continuous trials of plants on green roofs will also lead to the discovery of non-CAM plants suitable for green roofs in the tropics. Indeed, the tropics is blessed with such great plant diversity that there are exciting opportunities to create of green roofs featuring tropical look that are distinctively different from green roofs commonly seen in temperate climates. We can perhaps also draw inspiration from observations in nature on the types of plants that establish naturally on roofs, albeit these are roofs that generally suffer from a lack of regular maintenance. Research into this exciting new area has just begun.

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Plants that establish naturally on roofs.

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