Green Factor Tool
Photo by Mitchell Luo
Green Factor tool
Green Factor is a green infrastructure assessment tool designed by City of Melbourne and developed to help with designing and constructing new buildings that are environmentally friendly and include green infrastructure. It forms part of our work to respond to the climate and biodiversity emergency.
This new online tool is designed to help landscape designers, architects, planners and developers benchmark and improve how effective their greening designs for new buildings 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.
Green Factor is free and available for anyone to benchmark their greening designs. At present, its primary use is to help new developments in Melbourne to get the most benefits from their green designs. Eventually, the tool will also be used to ensure new planning applications comply with future planning policy requirements around climate action.
The tool is currently voluntary but we are asking all developers who submit a planning application for new buildings (except single dwellings) to submit a green factor scorecard, aiming to achieve a target score of 0.55 or 0.25 for industrial. This will help developers to get familiar with the tool and understand future requirements.
You can test and use the tool here: Green Factor tool.
Learn more, watch the recording below of the Virtual Canopy Forum: Green Factor Tool Launch.