How Green Design Can Help Secure Our Future
The extreme heat events seen in Europe over the past couple of weeks have had dire consequences across the continent. Fire departments have been working overtime to put out the excess of fires in cities and countryside alike, the tarmac at London Luton Airport melted, resulting in cancellations of flights and confused patrons, and the insides of subway cars in Central London reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit. This was one of the most extreme heat situations that Europe had seen in years, and unfortunately, it’s becoming a more regular occurrence across the globe.
In the face of such extreme weather events, people everywhere are looking for solutions to help cool down the globe without doing more harm than good. Thankfully, there are huge pushes in the status quo toward implementing green energy sources that release less carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and, in turn, decreasing global temperatures. However, solving a problem like drastic global warming will require interdisciplinary approaches and lots of creative thinking.
Applying green design in buildings and cities is an incredibly promising approach to easing the major heat waves happening all over the world, as is outlined by NPR’s Morning Edition with Rachel Martin and Brigitte Clements. Green design in cities means creating features inside of, on top of, and surrounding buildings, streets, and general structures that contribute to one or more sustainability goals. Such goals can include naturally cooling down buildings, taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, creating more plant space to attract pollinators, reducing overall water runoff, cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, and much more.
Green design isn’t a new concept. Plenty of buildings across the world are designed with sustainability and natural cooling in mind. For example, many homes are built with the intention of maximizing airflow and circulation in the interior by placing windows very precisely. By increasing airflow and circulation, the home is naturally cooled. Another easy naturally cooling green design element that is very popular is designing buildings with light colored roofs, a practice very common in towns in Greece. Black and darker colors absorb more heat and light than white and lighter colors, so light colored roofs naturally cool the interior of the building by reflecting light and heat energy.
Green roofs and walls are an element of green design that have been highly discussed and implemented in recent years, especially in dense cities with lots of buildings. Green roofs consist of beds of various plants (resembling a garden) often packed tightly together on top of buildings, and green walls are the same concept, just vertical. There are plenty of benefits of green roofs and walls, including increased intake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potential for increased crop yield in city centers (helping ease food insecurity), and even natural cooling of the interior of buildings. Brigitte Clements says in her NPR interview that, when plants transpire (during a process called evaporative cooling), they undergo a natural cooling process, which translates onto the surface of the actual roof of the building. This cooling process helps ward off heat in the interior of the building while providing a slew of other benefits.
So many of us lack the knowledge of what green design truly entails, which is one of the reasons it’s not very widely implemented. However, with more education and, in turn, implementation, green design could fundamentally change the way we deal with (and potentially reverse) the consequences of global warming, including extreme heat events like the ones seen all across Europe right now.
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