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The rise in outdoor temperatures and heatwaves highlights the limitations of buildings in adapting to warming conditions, even in temperate climates. This paper analyses the indoor overheating of residential dwellings in Pamplona (a city in northern Spain, with a Cfb climate) using an urban-scale diagnostic methodology and presents different envelopes' retrofitting scenarios as a strategy to reduce it. The results come from energy simulations conducted during an extremely warm summer in 2022, considering the microclimate effects. The residential typologies most vulnerable to overheating are those with only one orientation, built before the EPBD 2002, and located on top floors. These dwellings show a 23.7% mean of indoor overheating hours (IOH), representing approximately 870 h above the EN 16798-1:2019 adaptive threshold from May to September. Renovating building envelopes to meet current energy standards reduces the IOH by an average of 8.6% and up to 15.35% in the most vulnerable typologies. In the retrofitting scenario with green roof systems, indoor temperatures are up to 0.5 °C lower than when roofs are renovated with traditional systems. This study assists policy-makers in preventing the risk of overheating within cities and encourages them to promote nature-based solutions in order to adapt urban residential buildings and cities to warming conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dry Mediterranean climate (BShs) is the European region with the highest number of hours of sunshine per year. The high annual solar radiation makes sun shading devices necessary to comply with current energy efficiency standards. However, these standards do not sufficiently consider their effect on the indoor lighting comfort of buildings. The objective is to qualitatively and quantitatively determine how movable sun shading devices jointly influence the energy efficiency, thermal comfort and lighting comfort of buildings in BShs climate. The scientific novelty of the work consists of demonstrating the limitations of the sun shading systems commonly used in southeastern Spain and determining the optimal technical solution in this climate to simultaneously improve thermal and lighting comfort. This research comparatively studies the influence of various movable sun shading systems on the daylighting and thermal performance of an educational building. This study conducted on-site measurements, user surveys and computer simulations to study how to improve the thermal and lighting performances of the building. This work demonstrates that interior solar shading provides little improvement in thermal comfort and reduces the cooling demand by only 25%. External movable sun shading improves thermal comfort and reduces the cooling demand by more than 60%, but only adjustable blinds or awnings achieve adequate and homogeneous illuminance values as they diffuse daylight. The paper concludes that energy efficiency standards should be modified to ensure adequate lighting comfort in buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An effective strategy for sustainable development is to conduct research on vernacular architecture in response to urbanisation as well as environmental and climate change challenges. However, focused discussion has been limited to date due to the diverse range of disciplines involved in vernacular architecture and the unique examples in practice. Scopus, one of the largest literature databases, was used to find and select a total of 1403 documents for this paper. Techniques for both quantitative and qualitative literature analysis were employed using Microsoft Excel (Version 16.75.2) and the visualisation tool VOSviewer (Version 1.6.19). Using bibliometric analysis, more academic publications were reviewed, aiming to analyse the current situation, influence, and future direction of the literature related to vernacular architecture. The current issues have been obtained from the statistical results, and the opportunities and challenges of vernacular architecture in today's cities are discussed. The twenty most frequently referenced publications, keywords, and correlations between co-occurrences were all examined in this bibliometric analysis, along with annual publishing trends and the most influential nations, institutions, sources, and authors. The analysis showed a rising trend in vernacular architectural publications, with China, Italy, and Spain being the most prolific nations whose institutions have a high academic impact. However, the degree of international author collaboration remains insignificant. Future themes could focus on energy, comfort, earthquake resilience, and sustainability, with cultural heritage and vernacular communities still receiving little research attention. This study is a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of vernacular architecture, as well as an important study of sustainability and resilience, affirming the importance of vernacular architecture in terms of future urban form and drawing on the lessons of history. Also, the proposed research framework could be a strong reference for future researchers looking for inspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change will have a great impact on the hottest climates of southern Europe and the existing residential stock will be extremely vulnerable to these future climatic conditions. Therefore, there is an urgent need to update this building stock considering imminent global warming by applying climatic files that predict future conditions in building performance simulations. This research makes use of the two most applied tools (Meteonorm and CCWorldWeatherGen) for generating future climate hourly datasets for 2050 and 2080 in southern Spain. The results predicted for outdoor and indoor thermal conditions and cooling and heating demands are evaluated for two different scale simulation models: a test cell and a multi-family building located in southern Spain. The main aim of this work is the development of a comparative analysis of the results to highlight their potential differences and raise awareness of the influence of the climate data projection method on the simulation outcome. The results show that the projection method selected for producing future climatic files has relevant effects on the analysis of thermal comfort and energy demand, but it is considerably reduced when an annual evaluation is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction sector has an important role to play in reducing the threat of climate change. Thus, this work proposes, analyses, and compares two constructive strategies for the intervention/rehabilitation of a protected building located in Seville (Spain). The first solution intends to follow traditional techniques and standardized criteria, while the second option takes into account environmental aspects for the constructive definition of the proposal. An environmental study of each constructive solution, using a life-cycle assessment methodology, as well as an energy behavior analysis were carried out. The results show that the "sustainable proposal" represents a significant environmental improvement, in which a reduction in CO2 emissions and incorporated energy can be appreciated apart from an optimal energy certification. Finally, the sustainable proposal reveals a significant economic reduction in the total budget of the intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]