Salvatore La Bella
University of Palermo, Italy
Title: Green walls used as a low-input technology to cool buildings in the Mediterranean area
Biography
Biography: Salvatore La Bella
Abstract
The building sector – public and private, residential and industrial, plays an important role when seeking to address greenhouse gas emissions. Thermal insulation is a technique which reduces energy consumption due to thermal regulation in buildings, thereby reducing the emission of substances which are damaging to human health and/or to the climate, such as carbon dioxide CO2. Amongst those technologies which can lead to improvements in energy efficiency in buildings, green walls are of considerable interest: a technology as yet little widespread, particularly in the south. Green walls could represent an extremely useful technology in the control of thermal dispersion in buildings. However, research in this area is still very much on-going and mostly regards examples of green walls constructed in central and northern Europe, where the main problem faced by energy efficiency schemes in buildings is that of heating. In the Mediterranean area, however, the main problem is cooling buildings and there is very little scientific data and information on the issue to date. In this paper we consider studies carried out in the Mediterranean area on the identification and characterization of species which are particularly adapted for use in the construction of large-surface green walls.
