Rooftop Biodiversity Garden Installed in Guildford

ZERO and Surrey Wildlife Trust have teamed up with asset manager Redevco and property management company Momentum Group to install a rooftop ‘biodiversity garden’ on White Lion Walk.

Reversing nature loss is a top priority for many Surrey residents*, with 11% of our county’s native species having gone extinct in the last few decades, and around one-third on the critical list according to the State of Nature Report.

There are many contributing factors to this, from warming temperatures disrupting our traditional seasonal patterns, to pollution, to invasive species – which in Surrey include examples such as Himalayan balsam, the Asian hornet, and signal crayfish.

But a key factor is loss of natural habitat due to development, and the fracturing of these habitats by urban areas. Guildford for example creates a split in the National Landscape of the Surrey Hills to the south, and woodland to the north. This creates difficulties for plants and animals transitioning through their habitats, restricting the area they can move and increasing competition for resources.

ZERO is a member of the Reclaim Network; a partnership of over 100 organisations working on various aspects of ‘urban greening’ from research to implementation. We are very much on the ‘doing’ side of the urban greening spectrum, experimenting with how urban greening, or green-blue infrastructure as it’s known (GBI), can benefit our local places and communities.

Aside from the benefit to our volunteers of being out doing something active involving nature – which can bring both mental health and general life satisfaction boosts – urban greening interventions can provide some fantastic cross-cutting benefits to Surrey communities and town centres, including:

• Providing key sites for wildlife – particularly pollinators – to transition urban areas
• Reducing air pollution by trapping particulate matter
• Increasing resilience to flooding, with 85,000 Surrey homes and countless businesses at risk of flooding as a warming atmosphere holds more moisture
• Reducing the ‘urban heat island’ effect which can make towns and cities significantly hotter than their surrounds, causing heat stress in residents
• Improving wellbeing and mental health through the provision of green space in otherwise grey urban areas

Alongside the White Lion Walk project, ZERO has installed a green roof at Guildford Nursery, to provide kids with educational opportunities and some greenery in their lower playground, as well as creating a reflection garden for students at a secondary school in a ward with the least access to green space in Surrey. We’ve also provided 300 water-thirsty trees to George Abbot school and helped plant them, to counter the issue of flooding playgrounds. This sort of occurrence stands to increase as extreme weather events become more frequent due to climate change, and closing school classrooms doesn’t just mean that students lose out on class time; the knock on impacts are higher costs to repair infrastructure damage, as well as loss to the Surrey economy if parents have to stay home to look after kids who can’t attend their schools.

So we feel that this sort of GBI project is extremely worthwhile, and although it can be tricky to find the right location and stakeholder to work with, the White Lion Walk garden is a brilliant example of a company using Corporate Social Responsibility funds, and working with local volunteers to demonstrate a commitment to implementing solutions that don’t just benefit Surrey residents and communities but can also contribute to tackling global scale issues.

If you’ve got either a premises or some funding you would like to use for similar green blue infrastructure projects in Surrey, get in touch with ZERO and we’d be happy to discuss potential options.

* SCC’s Monthly Resident Insight Unit shows nature to consistently rate in the top 5 Surrey Resident priorities, along with healthcare, NHS privatisation and climate change.