| Resumo: | Water scarcity is an issue of worldwide concern and a holistic approach to water management is needed to overcome the potential threats that climate change brings to water availability and security in many parts of the globe. Societal and economic challenges need to be addressed when implementing technological solutions to environmental problems. The fact that green areas in the cities have been reduced and replaced by impervious buildings and paved streets has caused a number of problems, such as an increase in the amount of stormwater runoff discharged into the public drainage system. Green roof (GR) structures promote several ecosystem services and can counteract such effect and contribute to manage stormwater floods within city settlings, at the same time allowing for their storage for later reuse by collecting some of the rainwater into the growing substrate and reducing the runoff into the public drainage system (Schroll et al., 2011), and these advantages can be enhanced with the installation of a system of rainwater harvesting in the buildings. At the same time, Mediterranean countries are among those with high risk of water stress and rainwater harvesting in buildings can be a measure to promote water use efficiency. The present research study shows an example of established GRs at a pilot scale in the city of Porto (fig 1) (Monteiro et al., 2016). Different growing substrates and aromatic plants species were used to evaluate the runoff coefficients applicable to our Mediterranean climate, in order to assess the GR capacity for rainwater runoff delay. This contributes to improve the basis for the design of rainwater harvesting systems in buildings with GR in Mediterranean climate, particularly in regard to runoff coefficients and aspects of water quality and its reuse.
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