Menno Schokker
The aim of a paper I wrote a year ago was to scrutinize the barriers for establishing widespread green roofs (GR) in the USA, Australia, Hong Kong and Belgium and to look for similarities. In this way, one gets a start of an overview of the global situation. After having researched several papers and/or reports about barriers concerning widespread applicability of green roofs or green development in the various countries, I identified the barriers and proposed some recommendations. It will be good to share.
The main barrier for every country, no matter how (un)developed in GR widespread development, is of financial nature. Applying a green roof is still not financially attractive enough, because of various reasons. Even in countries where widespread GR technology is relatively well developed, to make it possible the government still needs to subsidize GR development and make it mandatory through policy measures. A second main barrier seems to be of a knowledge and cultural nature: a lack of knowledge of GR benefits results in a lack of urgency and awareness for widespread GRs in both the public and private sector. This barrier however, only seems to apply to the less well developed countries (in terms of widespread GRs), such as the USA, Hong Kong and Australia. One could say that, globally speaking, the highest result with the same means would come from tackling the cultural and knowledge barrier, before moving on to detailed financial aspects.
Hopefully such a paper with its result and conclusion shows the use of having an international overview. Five countries with just two papers as a source each is clearly too few; more elaborate studies of more countries is needed, including relatively successful countries such as Germany and North European countries. When an elaborate international overview of barriers is in place, one can more efficiently look for global and local solutions.