One year in and we are can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. With a COVID vaccine on the way, we can take comfort that many of the restrictions we see today will be toned down. But, with vaccines having an efficacy rate of up to 95%, that could still potentially mean  a lot of cases after everyone is inoculated. (5% of Canada's population of 35 Million = 1,750,000 potential cases across the country after vaccination, but herd immunity will slow down and prevent infections)  So it is prudent to think that there will still be the need for some COVID precautions after mass vaccine campaigns are finished. But beyond COVID, there are other reasons we might want to keep up some precautions. This time last year, Canada had reported over 26,000 cases of the flu, and this year there were 57 ... IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY!!! Clearly, with a bit of prudence, there can be a significant drop in communicable diseases. At the start of the summer of 2020, people were venturing outsid...

After our last post about green roofs at the University of Ottawa, I got a lot of questions about why we can't have green roofs everywhere on campus. If the answer was simple, I wouldn't have to write a entire blog post about it... but since I am writing a post... you can probably take the hint that this is a bit more complicated then a yes/no kind of thing. As a quick reminder, the University has a design imperative in place that implies green roofs will be installed in any case where the building can take the weight without a new support system, that the building is still going to be around in 20 years, or if the roof wouldn't serve better as a place for solar panels. Photo credit - kingcounty.gov HOW MUCH CO2 COULD WE SEQUESTER? First thing people were asking me about was sequester CO2. If roofs can take carbon out of the air, why not do more of this? Of course all plants sequester CO2 but a green roof can't do as much as a tree and certainly not as much as a peat bo...