Green Factor forms part of our work to respond to the climate and biodiversity emergency.
This award winning online toolOpens in new tab is designed to help landscape designers, architects, planners and developers benchmark and improve how effective their greening designs for proposed developments are. Our hope is that it will help increase the amount of vegetation cover on private land in Melbourne.
Our environmental strategies have been used to prioritise the types of greening that will provide benefit to the public and the environment. The scoring of Green Factor is underpinned by the latest research into the environmental and social benefits of green infrastructure. Green Factor is the first online tool of this kind in Australia.
Green Factor will help new buildings to deliver benefits in the following areas:
- urban heat island effect reduction
- biodiversity and habitat provision
- stormwater reduction
- social amenity such as recreation and mental wellbeing
- urban food production
- aesthetic values.
In developing the Green Factor tool, the City of Melbourne commissioned the University of Melbourne to prepare peer-reviewed research titled 'Integrating Green Infrastructure into Urban Planning: Developing Melbourne's Green Factor ToolOpens in new tab'. This research incorporates a contextually-relevant weighting system which underpins how the Green Factor score is calculated.
Green Factor is free to use and available for the development industry to assess and benchmark their greening proposals. Embedded into our proposed Planning Scheme Amendment C376 Sustainable Building Design is a minimum mandatory requirement that all new developments must achieve a Green Factor score of 0.55 and a desired score of 0.55 for alterations and additions above 1000sqm gross floor area. A Green Factor scorecard must be submitted as part of the landscape documentation for all relevant development applications.
Learn more and watch the recording of the Virtual Canopy Forum: Green Factor Tool LaunchOpens in new tab on YouTube.
Access Green Factor online
Submit feedback or ask questions about Green Factor
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