Sustainable power plant built with a rooftop ecosystem & ski slope.

Today Architectural Digest visits Copenhagen, Denmark to tour CopenHill — an innovative, climate-positive waste-to-energy plant towering above the city’s downtown that doubles as an urban ski slope built into a rooftop ecosystem. Produced by Architectural Digest in association with BBC Studios Natural History Unit & Moondance Foundation. #OurFrozenPlanet brings you urgent stories about the effects of climate change around the globe, and accounts of the people dedicated to championing positive change to protect the future of our planet.

A rooftop ecosystem is a green roof that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. It may also include additional layers such as a root barrier and drainage and irrigation systems. Green roofs provide ecosystem services in urban areas, including improved storm-water management, better regulation of building temperatures, reduced urban heat-island effects, and increased urban wildlife habitat. The ecosystem created by a green roof’s interacting components mimics several key properties of ground-level vegetation that are absent from a conventional roof.

The addition of vegetation and soil to roof surfaces can lessen several negative effects of buildings on local ecosystems and can reduce buildings’ energy consumption. Living, or green, a rooftop ecosystem has been shown to increase sound insulation, fire resistance, and the longevity of the roof membrane. They can reduce the energy required for the maintenance of interior climates, because vegetation and growing plant media intercept and dissipate solar radiation. Green roofs can also mitigate storm-water runoff from building surfaces by collecting and retaining precipitation, thereby reducing the volume of flow into storm-water infrastructure and urban waterways. Other potential benefits include green-space amenity, habitat for wildlife, air-quality improvement, and reduction of the urban heat-island effect.

A Rooftop ecosystem can represent a class of technology that can be considered bioengineering or bio-mimicry. The potential for improving green-roof function lies in understanding the interactions between its ecosystem elements, especially the relationships among growing media, soil biota, and vegetation, and the interactions between community structure and ecosystem functioning. Further research into green-roof technology should assess the efficacy of a rooftop ecosystem compared to other technologies with similar ends, and ultimately focus on estimates of aggregate benefits at landscape scales and on more holistic cost-benefit analyses.