Get the latest tech news
Green Roofs Are Great. Blue-Green Roofs Are Even Better
Amsterdam is experimenting with roofs that not only grow plants but capture water for a building’s residents. Welcome to the squeezable sponge city of tomorrow.
“You have, in fact, a flat rain barrel on top of your roof,” says Kasper Spaan, policy developer for climate adaptation at Waternet, Amsterdam’s public water management organization, which is participating in RESILIO. The overall idea is for places experiencing worsening droughts and increasingly extreme flooding to deploy not only sponge city concepts on the ground—like patches of dirt with drought-tolerant plants to absorb stormwater into aquifers—but on top of their buildings as well. American cities like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh have been rolling out something similar: Taxes on the amount of impermeable area on a property, like concrete, that incentivize landowners to develop gardens and other green spaces instead.
Or read this on Wired