Summary:
To recap, a green roof is a sociotechnical system that has a multitude of environmental benefits, particularly for urban areas such as Easton. These benefits include improved air and water quality, stormwater management, and mitigating the urban heat island effect. Furthermore, building owners have the opportunity to significantly decrease their energy use, saving money and benefiting the environment. In this project, our group created a framework to address whether or not green roofs are viable option for solving Easton’s specific environmental problems. We did this by considering the social, political, technical, and economic contexts of Easton’s four major neighborhoods to provide a custom recommendation while keeping the community members ultimate decision makers. This allows the Easton community to decide themselves whether they think green roofs are worth it or if the resources should go elsewhere.
Challenges:
One of the main issues that we faced during this project dealt with determining what the citizens of Easton viewed as the most important environmental concerns. We had originally speculated that flooding, stormwater management, and air quality would be major concerns, but had no evidence. We initially planned to survey members of the Easton community to find out what environmental concerns they had, but we realized that in order to conduct our own survey, we would need to receive approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Not only would it take the entire semester to receive the appropriate approval, we realized that our survey would likely yield biased results stemming from response and convenience biases. To overcome this challenge, we reached out to Ms. Kathryn Semmens of Easton’s Nurture Nature Center. We asked Ms. Semmens if she had any data regarding the environmental concerns of Easton’s citizens and she sent us the Easton Matters Report that was conducted in 2016. Contained in that report were 311 responses from community members regarding their environmental concerns, organized into the four major neighborhoods: College Hill, West Ward, Downtown, and South Side. Additionally, the report consisted of responses from 16 city officials and 18 representatives from 10 community based organizations. All of these responses allowed us to understand what environmental concerns were most important for each neighborhood and for Easton as a whole. However, it is extremely important to understand that none of the samples contained more than 95 responses, so it is possible that the concerns identified in the Easton Matters Report are not undoubtedly significant.
A second major challenge of this report is the complex relationship between building ownership, maintenance, and funding. Private buildings have a less complicated path towards implementing green roofs because they are funding the project themselves. Public buildings would require funding through policy and taxpayers, where citizens might disagree on where this money should be allocated. It is important to note that while the majority of green roof benefits are granted to the greater public, the private sector suffers a majority of the costs. Even though policy would allow for green roof implementation on public buildings, we faced the challenging question regarding who “owns” the public building and who decides whether or not to implement a green roof? This is crucial to understand because the size of the investment and the lifespan of the green roof significantly influences current and future tax allocation.
Lastly, we faced a significant challenge in the form of time. With the way that the Engineering Studies 451 capstone was structured this semester, the scope of our project has changed significantly. Originally, we planned on implementing green roofs on governmental buildings in downtown Easton. However, the combination of limited time and a lack of data regarding the specifications of the buildings led us to refocus our scope. Next, we considered using one public and one private building within Easton as a case study which could then be applied to other situations. We planned to collect the building specification data in order to determine whether or not green roofs are a feasible solution in Easton. This would also allow for other urban areas similar to Easton to use our case study as a model for their community. Once again, we quickly realized that we lacked an adequate amount of time to gather such data. Thus, we eventually had to broaden the scope of our project and ultimately created a specific framework for each of the four major neighborhoods in Easton.
Moving Forward/Next Steps/Recommendations for Future Work:
In order to continue building off of our findings, we recommend future initiatives begin by reading our report and framework to gain an understanding of the four contexts that are associated with green roofs. We have a three-step suggestion for those looking to continue this research with the purpose of improving Easton’s environment. Due to the limitations of the Easton Matters Report, our first recommendation is to gather more data from Easton’s citizens regarding their concerns. One potential way to do so is to collaborate with Easton’s Nurture Nature Center to create a new survey that allows the citizens to respond more freely about their concerns of the city as a whole. A more open-ended question, such as, “What could be done to improve Easton?” would allow citizens to identify any concern, not just environmental concerns. This is important because, for instance, if most of Easton’s citizens view education as the biggest concern, it would not make sense to pursue green roof implementation in Easton.
With this data, if Easton citizens identify environmental concerns as their foremost issue, we recommend reaching out to community members, city officials, and the city’s Public Works Department. By doing so, they could work with these groups to gather data regarding building specifications, such as the building’s dimensions, how much weight it can support, its energy usage, and the existing roof membrane. Gathering all of this data would allow future researchers to determine the technical feasibility of green roofs in Easton with more certainty.
If green roofs are determined to be technically feasible, our final step of recommendation includes hosting a presentation at the Easton City Council. This presentation would include the framework that we developed, the results from the refined survey, and the technical feasibility of green roofs in Easton. This provides an initial reception from citizens and city representatives to assess community support towards green roofs. By presenting this information to the citizens, they are kept at the center of the entire process and are the ultimate decision makers in determining whether or not green roofs are the best solution to their specific concerns.
To read the Appendix of our report, click here.