Safety issues of vegetative roofs and façades: what is missing in the standards for fire and wind safety?

In recent years, the application of vegetative systems to complex built contexts, such as tall buildings, sky-bridge and infrastructures, has become more popular, due to the appreciation by building occupants and marketability for developers. Moreover, the positive reception from general public and city governments have encouraged designers to incorporate advanced vegetative systems inside and around new buildings. The development of standards, guidelines and research in the field of vegetative technology is imperative to the continued improvement in new systems, as well as ensuring the safety and success of the existing ones. The paper analyzes 29 documents (12 Standards, developed exclusively for vegetative systems, and also Guidelines, Building Codes, City Codes) in order to understand if the Standards and other "official documents" provide enough information to ensure that safety is achieved in the design and construction of vegetative roofs and vegetative façades/walls. In addition to standards – which are the most important documents – the mentioned “official documents”, included in the analysis, are the following types: building codes, safety codes and city codes and guidelines, handbooks, manuals, research reports undersigned from national/international recognized institution, authority, association. This paper addresses the following two topics: Fire Risk/Fire Safety, and Wind Design through a summary table of all the 29 mentioned documents. It is now the time to ask if the Standards are still applicable to the most state-of-the-art vegetative technologies or if they need to be expanded for the topics of safety, in particular fire and wind design.