Climate change is presenting many challenges to cities around the world and they will have to cope with decades of rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, among other effects. Climate change, air pollution, urban heat effect and heat waves, peak energy demands, lack of green space are amongst the most critical environmental issues in Iranian urban areas especially in Tehran. Some world cities have started to prepare for climate change and are looking for suitable adaptation measures to put in place. Despite green roofs potential as a climate change adaptation and mitigation tool and their widespread use in other countries, there are limited examples of green roofs application in Tehran. This paper examines the possibility of green roofs development in Tehran and discusses the opportunities and challenges to increasing their application in Tehran city considering its various environmental, ecological and economical conditions as an object to adapt climate change impacts. This study uses a descriptive- analytical method to investigate the possibilities and challenges of developing Green Roof industry in Teheran. Considering that Tehran suffer from lack of green space per capita in most of its districts, and they contain the lowest open spaces reserves to extend the green space areas, development of green roof industry as a tool can be a reasonable and applicable measure to adapt climate change impacts in this city. On the other hand, major barriers to increasing the prevalence of green roofs in Tehran are the lack of scientific data available to evaluate their applicability to local conditions, lack of understanding of the environmental and economic role of green roofs and lack of access to the technology.
