New Cool Roofs Toolkit

The Global Cool Cities Alliance has just released "A Practical Guide to Cool Roofs and Cool Pavements," designed to promote the adoption of cool materials in urban environments worldwide. The guide contains a wealth of information on the benefits of cool surfaces, technologies for enhancing solar reflectance, incremental material and installation costs, and program design. It is intended for use by contractors, vendors, facilities managers, and policymakers interested in expanding their involvement in the cool roofs market. While cool roofs will probably have only a marginal effect on global temperatures, they do reduce the local urban heat island effect and lead to significant energy savings for residential and commercial customers. Cool roofs also make the concept of albedo enhancement more tangible for everyday people, something that can easily be overlooked in abstract discussions of aerosol properties and radiative forcing.