Green roof vistas can improve attention and office work productivity

Green roofs can substantially improve attention response and productivity of nearby people, according to new research published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

The study, conducted by University of Melbourne researchers, assessed the impact of a 40 second micro-break comparing a city green rooftop vista with one of city concrete rooftop structures. Subjects who viewed the green rooftop vista performed tasks with significantly less errors than those who viewed the concrete rooftop vista.

Study lead researcher Dr Kate Lee, of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Science, outlined in a media statement that just a moment of seeing some green nature can provide a boost for tired workers.

"We know that green roofs are great for the environment, but now we can say that they boost attention too. Imagine the impact that has for thousands of employees working in nearby offices," Dr Lee said. "This study showed us that looking at an image of nature for less than a minute was all it took to help people perform better on our task."

Seventy Five percent of heatwaves now attributed to climate change

The original of this article was published at nofibs.com.au

The latest study of extreme weather events has concluded that 3 out of 4 heatwaves and extreme heat events and nearly one in five heavy rainfall events, on a global scale, can be attributed to human contributions to global warming through greenhouse gas emissions. As temperatures continue to rise, the percentage is set to increase even further.

The researchers looked at 'moderate' extremes, which they defined as events expected to occur on 1 in every 1,000 days under present conditions. It involved examining data on extreme weather events around the globe in a dataset going back more than 100 years, and using two dozen climate models.

There has been a growing ability to attribute some single extreme weather events via Fractional Attribution of Risk (FAR) to anthropogenic climate change. Some of the specific individual extreme heatwave and precipitation events that have directly been attributed include the flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000 (Pall et al 2013), the European heatwave of 2003 (Stott et al 2004), the 2010 Russian heat wave (Otto et al 2012), and Australia’s record summer temperatures of 2013 (Lewis and Karoly 2013).

This study, rather than looking at individual events, examined the change in extreme weather events on a global scale for the statistical attribution to climate change.

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