Biodiversity and buildings: Our relationship to nature

LEED Fellow Diego Felipe Prada shares his insights into the relationship between biodiversity and buildings.

Feature image: Rendering of Ciudad Educadora Espiritu Santo, a PreK-12 school campus in Meta, Colombia, with which Green Factory has been working for several years. Image courtesy of Green Factory and made by Bernal Arquitectos.

How does the concept of biodiversity relate to our built environment? Sometimes it may seem that biodiversity and buildings are mutually exclusive, since, almost by definition, a building is designed to protect us from everything that is outside. That is what has created cities to be human environments where we coexist with flora and "domesticated" fauna, but the diversity is far from what can be found even in the rural areas neighboring our urbanized environments.

Over time, however, we have come to see that without biodiversity and access to nature, we cannot ourselves exist. Working to preserve our ecosystems is increasingly revalued, as cities grow. More than half of the global population lives in urban environments, meaning that if we continue expanding in this way, we could lose our natural spaces. Already, conflicts between animals and people in cities arise as animals are increasingly displaced from their natural habitats.

Despite the need to preserve wild spaces in areas such as national parks, we must also find ways to coexist in a better way with nature in our cities, rural areas and other places of human habitation, so that we do not have a negative footprint, but instead can create and live in a planet that we don't need to protect from ourselves.

Left: A recreation of local ecosystem features at the Morichal in Villavicencio. Right: Different height levels of landscaping at Elemento in Bogotá. Photos courtesy of Green Factory.

Normally, in large cities such as Bogotá, Colombia, where I live, previous generations have ensured that natural spaces were preserved through parks, front gardens, backyards and other green infrastructure. However, as the population density increased over the passing years, there grew a desire to make every square meter of an urban area "productive," often edging out even the small natural areas that had been preserved.

Other past approaches led to unintended results, such as that of adapted species, where we planted invasive variants of grass that colonized green spaces and reduced the diversity of native plants. This caused us to employ fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals in the maintenance of these grasses.

As time went on, leading scientists, from A.P de Candolle to E.O Wilson to Charles Darwin, increased public understanding of multiple values in biodiversity management: the importance of native species and their preservation, the concepts of endemism and local biomes, and so on. These ideas were put on the table to emphasize the necessity of preserving both each specific ecosystem and the connections among them. A desert can be as important as a tropical forest.

The LEED Platinum Elemento project in Bogotá. Photo courtesy of Green Factory.

Now that we are working on reevaluating our human connection with the environment, we know that it brings us many benefits and that we must preserve it to ensure our own existence. How to accomplish rebuilding the health of our environment, though, is perhaps the most important question. For that, all this historical and conceptual context can help guide us in deciding what are the variables that define nature-friendly construction, and how the built environment can have a better connection with the natural environment.

As we know, one of the benefits of the LEED rating system is its guidance on how to define a sustainable building in these ways. In addition, the SITES rating system elucidates how to design an outdoor place with nature in mind, how to reduce impact and even advance biodiversity, creating a space where human development can coexist with nature. SITES supports landscape architects, planners and others in implementing nature-based solutions, and has projects in more than 23 countries that show the practical use of this certification.

Case study: Elemento in Bogotá, Colombia

With Elemento, a LEED Platinum Core and Shell office project, we began with an understanding of the surrounding ecosystem. In this case, extensive wetlands were responsible for water regulation of the ecosystem, hosting diverse wildlife including migrant birds. Elemento is a complex composed of four towers of 18 floors each, with a platform of almost 13,000 square meters over four floors of parking. With all of this in mind, a multidisciplinary team proposed a general plan with flood zones that allow for the regulation and management of runoff.

At certain times of the year, a mirrorlike surface of water attracts the migrant birds. Native pasture areas shelter insects and small mammals. Selections were made for local bushes and trees, to attract the greatest possible ornithological diversity, even ending up with a species of trees (Escallonia myrtilloides L.f.) in danger of extinction within the same complex.

Wetland landscaping in Elemento. Photo courtesy of Green Factory.

Through the subsurface of the wetlands, the team achieved a natural greywater treatment, which injects water back into the building along with the rainwater that filters throughout the platform, allowing a water consumption efficiency of almost 80% for the complex's building towers. On the roofs, we installed low-maintenance native and adapted species that could survive the conditions of the sun and constant cold wind, just as the vegetation of the local Paramo ecosystem does. Over 8,000 people work in this office complex, in a way that is friendly to nature and local biodiversity.

It's true that not all projects have the budget or space to be able to carry out this process, but a "brown roof" can be an incredible solution that works better budget-wise. A brown roof is a way to let nature be the landscape designer, by just leaving the substratum and allowing time for plants to colonize, eventually creating the same species distribution as in the surrounding area. Project teams should consider what exists locally, because nature always finds a way to survive and thrive, as long as we give it a little space.

In addition to LEED and SITES certification for individual projects, on the wider scale, LEED for Cities and Communities offers relevant credits like Ecosystem Assessment, Green Spaces, and Natural Resources Conservation and Restoration, where all of these principles are taken into account.

A "brown roof" allows native plants to distribute naturally in a space. Photo courtesy of Green Factory.

Our biodiverse home

In today's world, where ESG and green finance are growing in importance, even investment funds and banks recognize the importance of biodiversity. There is even a COP event for biodiversity, which will be held in 2024 in Cali, Colombia, the second most biodiverse country on the planet, to continue protecting, understanding and admiring what we call "nature."

Nature, in the end, is nothing more than our own home. Under its own dynamics, nature achieves a balance of complex, complementary functions that we must conserve as much as we can. Its positive effects are immeasurable, its variables are indefinable, and it goes beyond of what we know and try to define in our own terms. Without a doubt, it is impossible to think of our planet without the natural environment and its biodiversity, and our wish to save it is much more than wanting our children to be able to see giraffes and lions-it's ensuring the possibilities and health of their own lives in tandem with the natural world.

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