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🌿 Climate adaptation at one's own site

🌿 Climate adaptation at one’s own site

With the “Greening & Desealing of the Hörstel Corporate Headquarters” project, Borgel Elementbau GmbH is transforming its corporate site into a climate-resilient, resource-efficient, and future-proof facility.

At the heart of the project is a holistic concept that combines the greening of buildings and open spaces, large-scale soil restoration, and intelligent irrigation management.

The plans call for various forms of green facades—soil-based, wall-mounted, and trough-based green facade systems—as well as green roofs and open spaces that contribute to promoting biodiversity. At the same time, impervious surfaces will be converted to permeable surfaces and replaced with water-permeable vegetated paving featuring joint greenery composed of 100% wildflowers.

Intelligent irrigation management ensures that the greening systems are supplied with water according to their needs. An automated, sensor-controlled irrigation system is used for this purpose.

Combining climate adaptation and innovation

The project aims to sustainably increase the resilience of our corporate site against the impacts of climate change—particularly heat and heavy rainfall. At the same time, the goal is to improve the microclimate and the quality of the outdoor environment, while creating new habitats and thereby contributing to biodiversity.

For Borgel, the project also serves as a practical demonstration site. As specialists in sophisticated building envelopes, we want to showcase how building greening can be technically and structurally integrated into industrial and commercial buildings.

We do not view greening merely as an isolated, additional component. Structural framework, building envelope, irrigation, drainage, fire safety, vegetation, and future maintenance must all be coordinated right from the planning stage. It is precisely this expertise in managing interfaces that we aim to further develop through this project at our own site and leverage for future projects.

Funded by ERDF/JTF

This project is funded by the European Union and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia under the ERDF/JTF funding program “Klimaanpassung.Unternehmen.NRW” (Climate Adaptation for Businesses in NRW). Total eligible expenditure amounts to €235,000, with a funding rate of 50 percent—equating to a grant of up to €117,500. Through this project, we are jointly investing in a business location that integrates climate adaptation with sustainable corporate development.

Climate adaptation based on site-specific data

Our project begins well before the actual greening work starts. During the application process, we conducted an in-depth assessment of how our business site in Hörstel is affected by the climate.
This assessment was based on data from the NRW Climate Atlas and the climate impact analysis for the Steinfurt district. Key factors examined included rising heat stress, heavy rainfall events, and the high degree of surface sealing, along with the resulting impacts on buildings, open spaces, and the quality of the environment for people.
Based on this analysis, we developed a concept of measures for our site: various forms of building and open-space greening, the removal of sealed surfaces, and an intelligent rainwater and irrigation management system.
In this way, climate adaptation emerges not as an isolated measure, but from a site analysis and the interplay of various, well-coordinated solutions.

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