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In an attempt to provide a passive cooling effect, living walls (LW) gain more attention from architects, engineers, building planners and researchers. Several types of research proved that living walls could contribute to enhance and restore the urban environment and improve thermal buildings performance. This paper aims to provide a literature review for all different LW systems in order to identify and systematize their primary application, method and performance. This review paper organizes and summarizes the literature on LW when it is used as air temperature reduction for passive cooling in buildings. Thermal performance remains the most prevalent theme compared to others, representing almost half of all publications (53 out of 123), with the top three most highly-cited articles all related to air temperature, energy and pollutan reduction of LW. Continuing to evaluate the contribution of current LW systems to improve buildings temperature reduction and comparing the environmental impact of these systems with other passive cooling strategy. This paper reviews existing methodologies for evaluating thermal performance in a tropical climate and makes suggestions of potential LW for optimum temperature reduction. Corresponding to the initial test, it can be concluded that LW provides great potential in increasing building energy saving by passive cooling.