The Wild Climate Wall is an innovative green facade system designed to enhance biodiversity and climate resilience in densely built urban environments. By integrating native wild shrubs, herbs, and grasses, along with specially selected modular habitat systems (providing breeding and nesting spaces for wild bees, birds, and bats), the Wild Climate Wall offers a unique and heterogeneous diversity of plants and structures for vertical greening.
Main focus of this project is the development and testing of the Wild Climate Wall. In addition to its climate-regulating compensatory functions, this green facade system also supports the healthy growth of heterogeneous plant populations and increases structural diversity to create high-quality habitats for wild bees, birds, and bats.
The flora of the wall is carefully tailored to meet the specific needs of these species, ensuring above all high diversity of species and structures. The microclimatic effects of the wall are measured and analyzed, focusing not only on recording its cooling potential for the environment, but also on identifying the hygrothermal conditions within the habitat structures.
The effects of the system are evaluated in relation to the requirements of a healthy microclimate for humans, flora, and fauna. This approach helps identify both the potential for reducing heat stress and ways to further optimize the habitat qualities for urban flora and fauna.
After installation and testing of the functionality of the Wild Climate Wall, it has been demonstrated that the ecosystem and species diversity have significantly increased. Across the approximately 120 m² of test areas, over 70 different plant species were used. The plant selection and habitat systems were adapted to match the existing biodiversity of the surrounding area while also leveraging previously untapped potential for promoting ecological stepping stones in the area. Within less than a year, the floristic diversity of the wall expanded further, as ecologically valuable spontaneous vegetation, such as common dandelion, field sow-thistle, and great stinging nettle, naturally settled on the wall. Just a few weeks after installation, numerous animals, including important pollinating insects such as various species of wild bees, hoverflies, and butterflies, were observed on the wall. The functionality of the habitat systems has also been successfully validated: in addition to numerous nesting sites of different wild bee species, native hornets settled in, and breeding songbirds were observed in the wall.
Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP