by dr. ir. Robbert Snep, Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands
On the youtube canal of BIOTOPE CITY JOURNAL : https://www.youtube.com/@biotopecityjournal8524
At a rapid pace, we are still sealing huge areas of land every day – in Austria, this amounted to about 11 soccer fields = 11.5 hectares per day in 2021. This has fatal consequences for biodiversity. But it seems unavoidable: new residential quarters and industrial settlements need land – the latter often still in the far periphery of the cities.
These industrial estates sometimes occupy a much larger area than the inhabited city itself. When greened, they would be ideal refuges for flora and fauna. This is because these areas are hardly used by people during the marginal hours of the day, at night and on weekends, and lie almost untouched. This is ideal for flora and fauna, which could spread undisturbed – if, yes, if the many windowless buildings did not have green roofs or green facades, and trees were almost impossible to find.