City committee endorses push to investigate ways to encourage use of green roof technologies

The City of London is looking at incentivizing the use of green roof technologies.

At Monday’s planning and environment committee meeting, councillors voted to receive a report that suggests the city look at ways to encourage the use of green roofs and other technologies.

The city says green roofs can reduce the amount of rainfall that ends up in the stormwater management system and mitigate the urban heat island effect, among other benefits.

“What should the City of London be doing? What should we as Londoners be doing to reduce environmental impacts and reduce our ecological footprint? Green roofs are seen as something that can sort of, one piece of helping us do that.”

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One of the major potential incentives would be to allow a green roof to count as ‘landscaped open space,’ which the zoning by-law describes as areas intended to provide active and passive open space for occupants of the building.

The report says a green roof is not consistent with that intent, but it could still be one of many potential incentives.

Barrett also stressed that the strategy is not to require green roofs.

“This isn’t something that we would mandate. It’s something that we would put incentives in place as to ‘how could we encourage people to do these kinds of things?'”

The report was received at the committee meeting on Monday but final approval lays with full council.

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