Stephanie Bailey

In Singapore,buses have been given the green light to find new ways to reduce emissions and improve the air quality.GWS Living Art,a company specialized in urban green structures,installed green roofs on 10 public buses.

The “Garden on the Move” bus campaign is a study to test whether greenery can help lower the temperature inside the buses and reduce the amount of fuel needed to power the air conditioning.

“While the impact of greenery on buildings has been well documented,much less is known about the effects of greenery on moving vehicles,” said Tan Chun Liang,a research fellow at National University of Singapore who advises the initiative.

Liang hopes the research will demonstrate how cities can use plants to combat global warming and the Urban Heat Island(UHI) effect when a city experiences much warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas,due to the heat generated and absorbed by industry,traffic and building materials.

GWS Living Art has also installed a green roof on the top of a bus stop in Kuala Lumpur,Malaysia.“This initiative uses the same idea as Garden on the Move to replace lost greenery due to urban development,” said Zhi Kin,of GWS Living Art.

If rolled out on bus stops across the city,the company hopes that rooftop plants could help reduce the temperature,purify the air around the bus stop and curb the risk of flash floods by absorbing storm water.They also hope the initiative will reverse the decline of key species like bees,butterflies and birds.

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Do you know other good ways to reduce emissions and improve the air quality except what is mentioned in the text?