Research Recap: Revisiting Older Roofing Research, With Context
Research Recap
Research does not stop being relevant simply because it is no longer new. In building science, some studies continue to inform practice years later, while others are cited so often that their original nuance is gradually lost.
Over the past decade, research on roofing, urban heat islands, and climate mitigation strategies has played an outsized role in shaping policy discussions, design guidance, and code proposals. In some cases, findings have held up well over time and continue to offer valuable insight into durability, performance, and long-term outcomes. In others, conclusions have been simplified, selectively applied, or extended far beyond the scope of the original analysis.
The Research Recap blog series takes a closer look at both.
This series revisits a range of existing studies with a consistent, disciplined approach. Each post summarizes what the researchers set out to examine, highlights the key findings, identifies where uncertainties or limitations remain, and translates the results into practical implications for building owners and facility managers. Some studies warrant a fresh, more critical reading. Others deserve renewed attention because their findings remain relevant and often overlooked.
The goal is not to relitigate old debates or dismiss prior work. It is to read the research carefully, in full, and in context. Building science evolves incrementally, and decisions about roof systems benefit from understanding not just surface-level conclusions, but also assumptions, boundaries, and real-world applicability.
As roofing policy and design continue to emphasize sustainability, resilience, and climate response, it is increasingly important to distinguish between single-attribute solutions and whole-system performance. Long service life, repairability, embodied carbon, operational demands, and lifecycle value rarely show up in headlines, but they matter deeply in practice.
Sometimes that means questioning how a study has been interpreted. Sometimes it means reaffirming findings that still hold true. In both cases, the objective is the same: better decisions grounded in evidence, experience, and long-term performance.
As this series will show, roofing decisions are best informed by research that accounts for durability, lifecycle performance, and real-world operating conditions. EPDM roof systems, with decades of documented field performance, offer a useful lens through which to evaluate many of these studies. Their resilience, long service life, low embodied carbon, and repairability provide practical context for interpreting research findings and translating them into sustainable, risk-aware decisions for buildings over time. Research Recap is an invitation to revisit the literature, and make sure today’s decisions are informed by what the research actually says, not just how it has been remembered.