PMU199 Course Blog

What is Green Roof?

This is an amended version of “What is Green Roof?”

Nowadays urbanization becomes a worldwide phenomenon while cities become the centre of economic activities in countries. Despite the number of cities, the size of a city has a tendency to grow bigger, especially in developing countries with a huge number of populations.

“(Cities) and the nature tried to coexist….but it wasn’t that easy.”

(For those who have time, please click on the link above to enjoy an amazing video about environmental change on YouTube.)

With the growth of cities, trees and animals are disappearing from our daily lives because of the violation to the environment. In order to replace the losing green environment, somebody come up an idea to plant vegetation on top of the buildings. This environmental technology is called the Green Roof.

Research found out that roof Gardens had appeared since the beginning of the recorded time. They were mentioned in classical literature which gives evidence of the existence. (Roof gardens: history, design, and construction) Nowadays, the Green Roof can be applied to wherever funds, skills and opportunities have permitted. The idea of Green Roof is to cover the roof of a building with vegetation planted over a water-proof membrane with a design includes, as a minimum, a root repellent system, a drainage system, a filtering layer, a growing medium and plants.  The diagram below shows the layers of a typical green roof.

There are 2 types of Green roofs – intensive and extensive. Intensive green roofs can support a variety of plants and growth but are more labour-intensive. They are more garden-like areas which may also be used as recreation space for public access. They support fairly large trees and water features and the planting medium depth is usually greater than the extensive one.

The extensive green roofs, in contrast, require less maintenance (about once a year) and are designed to be self-sustainable but have a low performance nature. It usually contains only one or two plant species which can maximize the thermal and hydrological performance. The planting medium depth range from 41mm to102mm (1.6-4inch). (Green Roof Specifications and Standards)

There are lots of benefits to have a roof garden by serving several purposes on the top of a building, such as absorbing rainwater during peak rates in storm, lengthen the roof life 2 to 3 times potentially and negate acid rain effect. It also acts as an insulator of heat so that the demand of winter heat decreased. A new habitat is made for wildlife while reducing the amount of CO₂ and toxin in the atmosphere. As a result, there is a reduction in city “heat island” effect and low the urban temperature, therefore reduces summer air conditioning costs. As the figure below has shown, the building which has “greened” absorbs more heat than the one which do not. (Green Roof Specifications and Standards)

The main disadvantage of green roof is its high initial cost ($8 per square foot is a minimum amount which includes materials, work costs and installation whereas values around $12 to $24 per square foot are the most common, and may even cost more for the traditional built-up roofs).  Some green roofs have ongoing maintenance cost and thus enterprises may not want to put it in practice. Nowadays, there’s about 10% have been “greened” in Germany. (wikipedia) Besides Europe, green roofs are very popular in countries like United States, Canada, and Australia etc.

To conclude, the Green Roof is one of the most important and evolutionary way to fight against climate change. With the great profits that had brought by exploiting the environment, we should pay for what we have done. The green plants may replace several features or function of the large reduction of forest. Government should be responsible to encourage its people to carry out this practice. In the most ideal case in the future, all buildings should be “greened” to reduce the effect of human to the nature, and therefore improve the living environment for the next generations.

In Toronto, there’s an Eco-Roof incentive Program promoted by the City of Toronto to fund the green roof projects for industrial, commercial and institutional buildings. For more information, please click this link.

 Today I have decided to improve my previous blog post. It may be fairly similar to what I had before but I decided to write a new one just in case I end up making a lot of changes.  In case you don’t remember, or in case you’re not planning on reading my old post, I plan on writing about Carbon Footprints and the impact that they have on the environment and Climate Change. I will also discuss various tips on reducing your carbon footprint.  

What is a Carbon Footprint? 

A carbon footprint is a unit of measurement that determines how much human activities impact the environment and how they may possibly influence climate change. It focuses on the amount of greenhouse gases that each person individually produces and the units of Kg/tonnes equivalent. 

What is an ideal size to keep your carbon footprint at?

The ideal size for a carbon footprint is………….1 tonne per person per year. That may seem like a lot of carbon, but in reality that number is actually quite small. The average size of a carbon footprint in the United Kingdom is in fact 9.4 tonnes per year. That definitely makes the ideal of 1 tonne per person per year seem pretty small.

How does a carbon footprint get calculated? 

There are various ways and many criteria that can be used to help calucate your carbon footprint. For instance, a person is able to calucate their carbon footprint both within their home and with their car useage. If you would like more details on how your carbon footprint may be calculated click here.

Tips on reducing your carbon footprint.

Click here – Tips on Reducing your Carbon Footprint . This website is very concise in offering tips to lower your carbon footprint, but I will still summarize the article. The main point that I got from this article is, LESS IS MORE!  The less carbon that you omit, the more that you are helping save the planet. Just small changes in your lifestyle could make a big impact on helping the planet if everybody decided to take part. For example, a very simple thing to do would be to stop purchasing bottled water. Often times, plastic is not biodegradable, and also the amount of emissions required to ship the plastic water bottles is too great. A smarter idea would be to purchase a water filter so that you can filter the water from your tap (if you don’t like the taste of tap water). Also, you would be saving money by not buying bottled water which is always a bonus!

I hope you enjoyed my blog!

The polar bear (also known as the Ursus Maritimus or the “sea bear”) is the world’s largest terrestrial predator, and can be found in many locations including the Arctic, Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia. The polar bear lives in extreme cold climate conditions on the annual arctic sea ice, with temperatures dropping as low as -45 degrees Celsius. In fact, the polar bear needs sea ice to survive. The arctic sea ice allows the polar bear to hunt, live, travel and breed – sea ice is the basic foundation of the arctic marine ecosystem.

It is estimated that there are currently 20-25,000 polar bears worldwide; most of which live in Canada. With that being said, studies have shown that approximately two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear by the year 2050. Why you ask? Because of global warming. As temperatures increase, the ice, that the polar bear depends so heavily upon, is melting away – destroying the polar bear’s natural habitat. Global warming is a growing ecological issue that is inflicting an abundance of negative effects upon the polar bear’s survival. As the severity of this situation increases, the possibility of the polar bear’s eventual extinction comes into play.

According to the NWF (National Wildlife Federation), rapid Arctic ice melting in 2007….

• Caused a record low for the surface area of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, nearly 23 percent below the previous record low in 2005
• Melted an additional area equivalent to the size of Alaska and Texas, combined
• Exceeded the projections of most climate-ice models. Based on rapid melt, one NASA scientist projected summer ice could be essentially gone as early as 2012

**This data fortifies and illustrates the severity and intensity of rapid Arctic ice melting.

The polar bear is situated at the top of the Arctic marine ecosystem, and finds its primary food source from the seal. The sea ice functions as the polar bear’s mechanism for hunting and traveling — seals create ‘breathing holes’ in the ice, and the polar bears wait until the seals surface, to then consume the seals as their food source. As the excess heat melts away the sea ice, the polar bears are left wandering, unable to catch seal. The scarcity of their food supply is continuously increasing, and the polar bears are left with nothing to eat This reduced food availability is leading to the starvation and death of many polar bears. Scientists and researchers have found the bodies of multiple polar bears that had starved to death. Both their habitats and food supply are disappearing – which in turn poses a life-threatening concern upon the survival of this species.

Although polar bears are recognized as rather strong swimmers, there have been multiple cases of polar bears drowning. Polar bears are being obligated to swim excessive distances across open sea (up to 60 miles!) to find food and habitat. These ‘sea voyages’ are becoming longer and essentially never-ending. The ‘ice floes’ from which they feed and rest are rapidly decreasing in size and drifting further away from one another. These ‘voyages’ are leaving them susceptible to extreme exhaustion and hypothermia which is causing them to drown as they desperately search for food and habitat. A study on bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay shows that for every week earlier that ice breaks up, bears become 10kg lighter than what they should be. It is also very important to keep in mind that the polar bears are swimming these unbelievably long distances, with a critical lack of ‘fuel’ (proper food source). Because of this shortage of food supply, the polar bear becomes progressively weaker — very little energy, along with decreased strength and power. This is a long and strenuous voyage for a healthy, fully-nourished polar bear to endure; never mind a weak, starving bear. “Last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes.” (From the Sunday Times — “Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts”)

“Our results have demonstrated that as the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” – Steven Amstrup, a USGS wildlife research biologist. Global warming is currently the most powerful threat to polar bear extinction and if this issue is not addressed in the near future, the threat of extinction will become a reality.

Finally, I have included a link to a short video, “Polar Bears on Thin Ice” from CBS News to better illustrate the crisis of polar bears.

Global Climate change is a rising issue amongst the world at the moment and every living thing on this planet is affected. For human beings, this impact is much greater than simply affecting our personal, it affects the society, affects the economy, and one thing that relates to our basic survival – it affects agriculture. If the agricultural methods are affected due to global climate change, then our basic need for survival – food, will be affected as well.

With unstable weather patterns exposed to the farms, crop yields are greatly affected by the event, and the use of open-field farming is now endangering the farms. Open-field farming is the most basic method of agriculture where the crops are on the fields without any protection, making it vulnerable to outside damages. This is therefore taking an enormous hit onto the lives of farmers.

Let’s look at example, the Chinese community is one of the growing countries of the world, a developing country. One of their problems involve the lack of awareness for the issue of global climate change. China, which still uses the conventional open-field farming method, suffered when global climate change took a hit in the year of 2006. The table below suggests this exactly, in the year 2004, the number was high in the 72 million region, by the time 2006 stroke, which was the year the worst dust storms his China, the number dropped down to 54 million.

Economic damages to the farmer’s lives and basically affecting their way of surviving in this world. More and more farmers are now searching for an energy- and cost-efficient model that can help save their own business. One of those models introduce the concept of greenhouses.

Greenhouses are glass buildings in which crops are grown, to protect them from the cold weather outside, this type of glass greenhouses are considered the traditional method of greenhouse farming. Traditional greenhouses may use the glass as walls to collect heat from the outside and storing them inside to keep the greenhouse at a relatively warm temperature. Global climate change presenting the unstable weather patterns will affect this setup. First of all, with frequent-changing temperatures, the greenhouses cannot store heat efficiently because of fluctuating temperatures on a near-daily basis. Second of all, traditional greenhouses aren’t excellent heat-storing devices.

The saviour of agriculture in this time would be known as solar greenhouses. Ever since the concept of “global warming” was introduced to mankind, most people turned towards solar energy to be more energy-efficient, and it is quite useful. Introducing the concept of solar energy to agriculture can greatly help the farmers.

Of course, there are different types of solar greenhouses: Passive or active. Passive solar greenhouses (the two greenhouses on the left of the diagram above) are ones that uses the building itself as the heat-storing device, therefore it is a very cost-efficient method of agriculture for it is cheaper. The active solar greenhouses (on the right of the diagram) are the ones who depends on an external device to store heat. This way it is much more expensive, but the farmer can control the heat much better than any other types of greenhouses. Most of the food that we are all eating today are known as high-value crops, meaning they are crops with high demand on them, for example, strawberries or potatoes. These high-value crops are usually grown in active solar greenhouses because they can be better grown inside a greenhouse where the temperature is much more controlled and can be kept at an optimum level.

Greenhouse Canada wrote an article regarding the effectiveness of solar greenhouses: “The Solar Solution”

Since active solar greenhouses can produce high-value crops at a high quality, the demand for these crops will eventually increase, with more output, the farmers are bound to increase their profit.

It sounds very easy I know, but if everything was this easy then we wouldn’t have any problems within the world. A book stated that “there is relatively little evidence that farmers have responded to recent changes in climate by changing their farming practice, or that they have much knowledge of potential future climate change.” The problem is that farmers are not aware of the situation, also that they are not willing to sacrifice a large amount of money for solar greenhouses in order to save their business. To most farmers, that process is just wasting money, but what they don’t understand is that active solar greenhouses is a long-term profit-making method of agriculture.

The ideal future for agriculture is NOT having solar greenhouses everywhere, why? If that’s the future that means we have simply accepted the fact that global climate change is here to stay and we won’t do anything about it. The most natural way of agriculture is still open-field farming. Solar greenhouses are the solution to saving our agricultural market RIGHT NOW because of the issue we are facing. Thinking about a counter-argument against myself, solar greenhouses are still wasting resources if we think about it, which is why we cannot have solar greenhouses everywhere in the future. They can replace traditional greenhouses permanently, but they are NOT the future where open-field farming is non-existent while all you see in the rural areas are high-tech solar greenhouses.

At this point you may be wondering how all this even relates to global climate change, well I’m here to say, it’s not a direct effect from global climate change, it’s more of an indirect effect that agriculture is suffering through climate change, therefore affecting human beings. Like I said earlier on, if agriculture is largely affected by global warming, food prices will go up since there is now short of supply, and food quality will go down due to issues such as pollution. In the end, we get less food and the food we get is low quality thereby affecting our own health. If agriculture were to be aided by the technology of solar greenhouses, the farmers will not suffer economic damages, and everyone can still enjoy clean food without the price going up.

Of course, this is only one fraction of what agriculture really is. Climate change is the issue that affects crop yield, in which greenhouses are the solution to the problem. There are several other issues affected by pollution, for example, food security, health issues, and food mileage, etc.

Some of the resources used are from peer-reviewed articles and governmental resource sites:

“Quantity of Potato Production of China.” 2003-2008. Food and Agriculture Organization” of the United Nations. <http://faostat.fao.org/site/339/default.aspx>

Korecko, J., et al. “Module Greenhouse with High Efficiency of Transformation of Solar Energy, Utilizing Active and Passive Glass Optical Rasters.” Solar Energy 84.10 (2010): 1794. Print.

If you’re confused as to what the title is referring to, let’s revisit one of the most talked about moments from Hurricane Kartina footage, Kanye West style:

Kanye West Speaks Out

Don’t run away yet – my post is a bit more informative than Kanye was. I’m not trying to say that greenhouse gasses hate black people. But I have found some information that will make you feel pretty shocked – at least, it should. Hurricane Katrina may not have been a direct cause of global warming, but it was a well documented time where a natural disaster and racial issues were well intertwined.

It may seem strange to relate something such as a climate change to any ‘isms’ other than environmentalism, but it’s pretty easy to see it is inextricably linked to imperialism, colonialism and racism. Here are some things to think about:

• Australia, the US and Canada  produce the most carbon emissions per capita.
• China and India, placing 1st and 4th place in carbon emission by country, do not even rank in the top 10 countries of carbon emissions per capita.

Interesting. Australia, the US and Canada are pretty dirty. Makes sense that they were key players in the industrial revolution and were “First World” nations – they had the resources that created carbon emissions before most. Now let’s think about where these First World countries outsource their work. Take a look at the majority of products in your house, or probably the tag on your sweater – does it say that it was made in India or China? Remember that outsourcing is not commonly attributed in carbon footprints. This is called carbon emission outsourcing; where developed countries produce their emissions elsewhere – namely in developing countries – and we consume the products, but the carbon emissions weren’t made on our turf. For instance, the US outsources about 11% of their total carbon emissions ; the majority of that to the developing world.

This is a climate change course, not a humanities course, so I won’t dwell on the many underlying issues of why developing countries are primarily people of colour. But what I do want to talk about is how climate change will affect these bodies of colour. As we sit in a white, privileged, North American society, we worry about how climate change will hurt us. But we also fail to see – or  just ignore- how it is already affecting people that are outside of our borders.

Let’s take a look at Australia. In 2007, people of Tuvalu were displaced from theirnative land due to climate change, making them the worlds first (noted) climate refugees , essentially due to the drowning country because of high sea levels. Australia initially denied their migration because it would only produce more carbon emissions. Right.

Let’s take a look at ourselves, too. Canadians, our land of the free! OOPS, Our stolen land of the free. Last week Steve reminded us that because of the recession, emissions were down for North America – factories and other big industries closed down, but they are going right back up as we get out of the recession.

Let’s be real – once again I won’t go into details of systemic/institutionalized racism, but take a second and think about who represents the people that own and facilitate these pollutive industries. Did indigenous people come to mind? No, probably not. However, despite them not being at all largely responsible for these carbon emissions, they will be hit the hardest – as well as other marginalized bodies and people of colour who deal with displacement, poor resources and poverty on this earth – which, when we speak of indigenous people, was really theirs. Due to droughts and unusually dry winters over the past years, indigenous people of North America have had to deal with a loss of agriculture, erosion and loss of native plants/grass due to high temperatures, and natural disasters further isolate their communities (If you want to read more about this, you can see the climate change effects on indigenous people here .)

We can start to see how many of the people on this earth who contribute the least to climate change are going to be the people who are hit the hardest – and it doesn’t just ‘happen’ to be people of colour. This is a result of racially organized capitalist production and  “strategic” social systems.

Don’t get me wrong – no one can escape climate change. But it sure is clear of who it’s going to capture first. So when you think about climate change, don’t forget to include some climate justice in there. The earth won’t be the earth we know if it ends up only being for some of us.

-Kamilah

The polar bear (also known as the Ursus Maritimus or the “sea bear”) is the world’s largest terrestrial predator, and can be found in the Arctic, Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia. The polar bear lives in extreme cold climate conditions on the annual arctic sea ice, with temperatures dropping as low as -45 degrees Celsius. In fact, the polar bear needs sea ice to survive. The arctic sea ice allows the polar bear to hunt, live, and breed – sea ice is the basic foundation of the arctic marine ecosystem.

It is estimated that there are currently 20-25,000 polar bears worldwide; most of which live in Canada. With that being said, studies have shown that approximately two-thirds of the world’s polar bears could disappear by the year 2050. Why you ask? Because of global warming. As temperatures increase, the ice, that the polar bear depends so heavily upon, melts away – destroying the polar bear’s natural habitat. Global warming is a growing ecological issue that is inflicting an abundance of negative effects upon the polar bear’s wellbeing. As the severity of this issue increases, the possibility of the polar bear’s eventual extinction comes into play.

According to the NWF (National Wildlife Federation), rapid Arctic ice melting in 2007….
• Caused a record low for the surface area of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, nearly 23 percent below the previous record low in 2005
• Melted an additional area equivalent to the size of Alaska and Texas, combined
• Exceeded the projections of most climate-ice models. Based on rapid melt, one NASA scientist projected summer ice could be essentially gone as early as 2012.

The polar bear is situated at the top of the Arctic marine ecosystem, and feeds primarily off the seal. The sea ice is where the seal rests, and therefore where the polar bears can capture them to eat. As the excess heat melts away the sea ice, the polar bears are left wandering, with nothing to eat. The scarcity of their food supply is increasing and the polar bears are left with nothing to feed off of. This reduced food availability is leading to the death of many polar bears. Scientists and researchers have found the bodies of multiple polar bears that had starved to death. Both their habitats and food supply are disappearing – which poses a life-threatening concern upon their species.

Although polar bears are recognized as rather strong swimmers, there have been multiple cases of polar bears drowning. Polar bears are being obligated to swim excessive distances across open sea to find food (up to 60 miles!). These ‘sea voyages’ are becoming longer and essentially never-ending. The ‘ice floes’ from which they feed are decreasing in size and drifting further away from one another. These ‘voyages’ are leaving them susceptible to extreme exhaustion and hypothermia which is causing them to drown while attempting to swim to safety. “Last summer the ice cap receded about 200 miles further north than the average of two decades ago, forcing the bears to undertake far longer voyages between floes”. (Information from The Sunday Times – “Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts”)

“Our results have demonstrated that as the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” – Steven Amstrup, a USGS wildlife research biologist. Global warming is currently the most powerful threat to polar bear extinction and it is under OUR control to put a stop to this.

Mayor Rob Ford has a plan to transform downtown Toronto by 2050. Which includes re-designing the waterfront and introducing Eco-friendly buildings with green roofs and solar panels. Are you excited? For many of us we will be in our 70s before we get to see this grand new Toronto.

But is all this construction and re-building harming or helping? In the view of Toronto as a tourist destination and the most recognized Canadian city in the country it will give us a great pride and more people will travel to Toronto increasing the economy. On the other hand however is 50 years of construction and refurbishing even if it is introducing Eco-buildings worth it? How much is this harming the environment? Should something be done to change these construction plans to making the buildings that we already have more environmentally friendly?

The city says that with this face-lift, the plan is to reduce Toronto emissions 80% by 2050. What are your thoughts on this subject? Do you think this is a good thing? Are you worried that the suggested results are far off? Should we put this money to windmill farms? Or more public transit to cut down on the amount of cars in Toronto. What do you want to see from Toronto in the next 50 years?