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                    Cool roofs

                    Building with white rooftop and solar panels
                    Cool roofs reduce the amount of heat held and transferred to the building below, keep the building cooler and at a more constant temperature.

                    Cool roofs have additives to the base material or paint that reflect the sun’s heat and emit absorbed radiation back into the atmosphere at a higher rate than standard materials.

                    The City of Melbourne is committed to achieving zero net emissions for our city and a key step in meeting this goal is reducing the amount of energy used to cool the city’s buildings.​

                    The urban heat island effect

                    The urban heat island effect is often seen in urban areas, where infrastructure absorbs, maintains and then reradiates heat. This causes inner city areas to be a number of degrees hotter than surrounding rural areas.

                    Through the use of cool roof products, Melbourne can decrease the impact of the urban heat island effect on our city. Designing our infrastructure to minimise heat absorption will make Melbourne more resilient to increasingly extreme heat conditions as the climate changes.

                    For more information about cool roofs including costs, products and maintenance, see Cool roofs: a City of Melbourne guide (PDF 271 KB).

                    Cool Roofs: City of Melbourne Research Report (PDF 4 MB) contains information about cool roofs, their properties and benefits, and the results of field testing on buildings. The research was done by Melbourne University.

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