Fractal analysis of green roof spatial implementation in European cities

To face the consequences of climate change and unsustainable urbanization, green roofs are currently widely implemented in urban environments. Despite their benefits to restore ecosystem services are quite well established at the roof scale, green roofs need to be widely and appropriately distributed to perform efficiently at larger scales. However for now, this scale-factor is not considered to guide and conduct green roof implementation policies. Here we show that a multi-scale analysis based on fractal theory is helpful in providing information for green roof implementation and in assessing the relevance of these policies. Computed for 9 European cities, green roofs fractal dimensions are sparse, ranging 0.49 to 1.35, and illustrate some different degrees of progress in urban greening. These results demonstrate some significant inconsistencies between political ambition and their in situ realization, and the necessity to better take into account the spatial distribution of green roof implementations in order to optimize their performances.