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Pitch

Human activities significantly reduce biodiversity in our cities, which we can counter by creating more green roofs with beehives


Description

Summary

Before we start talking about how adding green roofs and beehives in our cities could counterbalance the loss of biodiversity due to human activity, let's first look at the problems we face with the loss of biodiversity: 

  • Food security : less biodiversity is very bad in terms of food security. Why? Because it means that we rely more on a certain type of crop. If a disease spread across the crop and wipes it, which does happen, the risk of a famine would be very high.
  • Loss of choice : it's a one way operation, if you wipe out an entire specie you can't just make it reappear in a day. (we're not in Jurassic Park and even if we can theorically try to reintroduce a specie it's much more difficult and costly than to wipe one out)
  • Health : we need a diverse diet to be in good shape
  • Lower productivity : It's been proven that less biodiversity in an ecosystem often results in a loss of productivity

 

Bees do a fantastic job keeping up the biodiversity by pollinating and the way their population is declining is alarming.

In China, many farmers have to pollinate by hand because of it, which costs more and is less efficient.

What we propose is the creation of many more green roofs in cities with beehives. That would help keep up the biodiversity in the cities as well as inure people to having environmental plans all around them. The climate adaptation benefits from green roofs and beehives is about adapting to the loss of biodiversity by creating an environment where it can be protected and even go the other way around.


Category of the action

Mitigation/Adaptation, Changing public attitudes about climate change


What actions do you propose?

I. The Actions

The idea here would be to add beehives and greenroofs in as many places as possible. The building roofs are usually useless and are accessible only by engineers. By replacing buildings roofs to greenroofs, the useless places are used for beehives and plantations. People could also go on roofs to see the "garden".

II. How

We need a small non-profit to help settings up these actions. The non-profit would gather information on where we can find constructors for green roofs, set up sessions to teach communities about managing a beehive, and create meetings with building managers to tell them how easy and beneficial it is to implement a green roof with or without beehives and how they can do it.

We can also imagine that the non-profit would try to get towns to invest into making the process of adding green roofs in their towns cheaper.

Concerning green roofs, we can add them :

  • On new roofs are roofs being renovated
  • On existing roofs. For that to happen, the roof needs to be 100% waterproof, which is why a recent (< 5 years) roof is largely preferable. The structure of the house needs to be able to hold some weight since it is heavy, but that's usually not an issue. Inclination can also be an issue when it is very important, but that's not the case for typical houses of buildings which can easily add a green roof

 


Who will take these actions?

A non-profit organization will take these actions. The plantations are added by volunteers of the building or external companies.


Where will these actions be taken?

These actions will be taken in cities, mostly on building and house roofs as well as official buildings.


What are other key benefits?

Keeping biodiversity up is already a good win.

Much like every other proposal, more actions concerning the environment contribute to making people realize how big of a deal our current situation is.


What are the proposal’s costs?

The non-profit wouldn't be in charge of making the greenroofs, which make things a lot easier. (although it could on long term). We would only to hire a few people, to organize meetings with people who own buildings, town officials and maybe one or two people to organize conferences on how to run beehives.

On long term, we could also make ourselves greenroofs and beehives to lessen the costs. Until then we can get money by asking for referral prizes to greenroofs constructors and beehives providers, or by giving courses to volunteers on how to make a greenroof yourself.


Time line

0-3 months: creating the non profit and recruiting. Selecting target cities and finding companies next to it which make green roofs as well as making a first plan for communication.

3-6 months: organize meetings in the town to get as many green roofs as possible.

6-9 months: from everything that happened, try to write a marketing/communication plan to apply to next cities, and choose the next cities.

After that, we'll repeat the operation for different cities.


Related proposals


References

https://www.sfecologie.org/regard/r46-patrick-venail/

http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/biodiversity/fr/

http://www.vigienature-ecole.fr/les-sciences-participatives-au-service-de-la-biodiversite/la-biodiversite-menacee-par-l-homme

http://agriculture.gouv.fr/abeilles-et-biodiversite

https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5193-Decline-of-bees-forces-China-s-apple-farmers-to-pollinate-by-hand

http://www.greenrooftechnology.com/green-roofs-explained