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Despite the introduction of numerous building energy codes, the sector’s energy consumption increased by an average of 1.8% per year from 1971 to 2010. Research implicates population growth and rise in income for this shortcoming, which result in an expansion of built-up area and enable higher spending on energy services. Other reasons include the rebound effect, where the anticipated energy savings from efficiency improvements are not achieved and, in some cases, consumption increases. This paper assesses the degree to which these socioeconomic factors were incorporated into BSEMs, and how this affects their validity and ability to devise effective building energy codes. The paper highlights the significant and unpredictable effect that these factors – e.g., rebound effect and elasticity of demand – have on buildings’ energy consumption. It was shown that the majority of BSEMs neglect these factors, raising questions on their validity and suitability to develop policies that can facilitate the achievement of the sector’s climate change target. The paper proposes a novel BSEM, where energy codes are reverse-engineered from climate change targets and consider the sector’s expansion. The proposed BSEM also devises socioeconomic policies that ‘neutralise’ socioeconomic factors to ensure that the codes’ intended energy savings are achieved.

The paper presents an energy simulation-based study to investigate the impacts of climate change on energy consumptions of an office building located in five different cities, United States. Annual energy consumption of a medium-size office building was predicted by building energy simulation software—EnergyPlus using TMY3 weather data and future climate data. In this study, we have used two sets of further climate data with different climate models including (1) Hadley Centre Coupled Model, version 3 (HadCM3), and (2) NCAR Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) with the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5). A morphing method was applied to downscale the monthly weather forecast to hourly forecast for use in building energy simulation for the two General Circulation Models (GCMs): HadCM3 and CESM1. Using the generated future weather files, HVAC operation related mitigation measures including adjustment of thermostat setpoints, reduced HVAC operation hours, reduced VAV box minimum flow setting, and mixed-mode ventilation were simulated to compare with ASHRAE Standard 90.1 baseline simulated using TMY3 weather data. Simulation results on predicted whole building, heating and cooling energy consumptions were examined. The paper highlighted the importance of efficiently operating mechanical systems in buildings to ensure a more sustainable future.

In the climate change era, urban geometry serves to ensure sustainability for urban planners since it notably affects building energy consumption. However, previous studies have mainly conducted experimental investigations under hypothetical conditions. Without empirical evidence, it is difficult to implement these findings under real conditions. This paper examined empirical data to determine the urban geometry effect on building energy consumption in a large, complicated urban area. Urban geometric parameters, including the surface-to-volume ratio, obstruction angle, and building orientation, were measured across Seoul, and their correlations with building energy use were analyzed. The results show that the surface-to-volume ratio and obstruction angle are important, despite the empirical data complexity. Additional data analysis indicates that the heating energy type and building use consideration yields more reliable correlation coefficient trends. The potential impacts of natural ventilation and the urban heat island (UHI) effect on building energy consumption were examined. The UHI effect, rather than shadows on buildings, predominantly impacts the building electricity use in August and September. The correlation variation caused by the building permit date was investigated. The results in this paper could help urban planners and designers develop blueprints to control urban geometry and establish relevant design guidelines.

Under the background of global warming, the world is experiencing many extreme climate events. The temperature fluctuation associated with climate change is often considered as a primary driving force of electricity consumption. To better explore the impact of temperature on electricity consumption, this paper aims to analyze the question from the perspective of income growth, i.e., the moderating effect of income growth on the response of urban residential electricity to temperature changes. Using the unbalanced panel data of 23 cities in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration from 2004 to 2015, we construct the response model of residential electricity consumption to income growth, heating degree days, cooling degree days and their interactions. The results show that heating demand, cooling demand and income growth significantly increase residential energy consumption. However, urban residential disposable income growth weakens the positive effect of heating demand and cooling demand on residential electricity consumption. Because, urban residents have obvious demand for improving indoor heating comfort and cooling comfort, the moderating effect of income is shown as the crowding-out effect. Residents may adjust the structure of heating energy consumption (from electricity to natural gas) and upgrade their electrical equipment to high energy efficiency equipment, thereby reducing residential electricity consumption. This study also indicates that urban residential energy consumption is very sensitive to changes in permanent populations. The main contribution of this study is proposing the hypothesis of the negative moderating effect of income growth on temperature changes and expanding the response model of residential electricity consumption to temperature changes. Finally, this paper also proposes the adaptive strategies and policy implications for climate change.

Urban climate change phenomena, exacerbated by increasingly frequent heat waves, represent an urgent environmental research issue to be further investigated and counteracted through multidisciplinary approaches covering both engineering and socio-environmental sciences. After acknowledging that Urban Heat Island hugely affects building thermal-energy behavior, recent contributions deal with its effect on vulnerable population groups in terms of their exposure risk to health diseases even worsened by energy poverty. In this view, the paper investigates the role played by occupants’ education and their knowledge of environmental risks and climate change-related events, by exploring the opportunity to improve their information level as trigger for improving their climate change behavioral resilience and reducing their health risk in the built environment during extreme events. To this aim, a novel widespread questionnaire was elaborated and submitted to more than 300 individuals with varying their educational background and personal characteristics, seasonal period, submission mode, temporal closeness to heat wave emergency. Key findings showed that participants’ educational background represents a clear way to drive environmentally aware behaviors minimizing the consequent health risk imputable to urban overheating and other environmental hazards such as heat waves. In fact, a higher level of awareness and consciousness may lead to a better adaptation capability to such climate change related hazards since they tend to implement conscious and resilient behavioral attitudes to minimize their indoor thermal stress at home (0.8 versus 1.4 points awareness level about mitigation strategies). Therefore, this paper demonstrated that informative campaigns may represent an effective strategy for making building occupants more resilient to climate change toward dedicated environmental management solutions and policies taking advantage of educational vehicles.

As most promoted solution of climate change, green buildings become more popular and widely promoted in China recently. This paper compared the carbon emissions of green buildings with non-green buildings; therefore, a life cycle carbon emission assessment approach (LCA) was attempted. In the present paper, we have integrated existing database Building Environmental Load Evaluation System (BELES) developed by Tsinghua University and twenty-six real existing buildings (nine residential and seventeen commercial buildings). Buildings located in two major climate zones were selected, namely, zone II and III. Five phases were defined for a whole life cycle of building: Phase 1 Raw Materials, Phase 2 Transportation, Phase 3 Construction, Phase 4 Operation & Maintenance and Phase 5 Demolishment. In each phase, the emissions were calculated separately. It is found that whole life cycle CO 2 (LCCO 2 ) of green buildings are lower than that of non-green buildings, i.e., 10% for residential and 32% for commercial buildings, respectively. For both residential and commercial buildings, Operational & Maintenance phase contributes the majority of emissions in the whole life cycle, about 69.2–89.3%. Moreover, green buildings have slightly higher embodied CO 2 emissions than non-green buildings, but with much lower operational emissions, and this phenomenon is significant in residential buildings. This indicates that the LCCO 2 of green buildings start to match with LCCO 2 of non-green buildings after operating for certain years, which is the turning point. Furthermore, China implemented Standard for Energy Consumption of Buildings in December 2016, which listed two values for energy efficiency in operational phase, which represents requested and optional. It can be expected that the emissions in Operational & Maintenance phase of green buildings will be further reduced in the future. Consequently, in the future, the dynamic flow of turning point of residential buildings will be shifted downwards from existing 14 years found in this paper.

There has been general recognition within the construction industry that there is a discrepancy between the amount of energy that buildings actually use and what designers considered that they should use. This phenomenon is termed “The Performance Gap” and is normally associated with new buildings. However, existing and older buildings contribute a greater amount of operational carbon. In response to the Performance Gap, CIBSE have developed the TM54 process which is aimed at improving energy estimates at design stage. This paper considers how the TM54 process can also be used to develop energy management procedures for existing buildings. The paper describes an exercise carried out for a university workshop building in which design energy use has been compared with the actual building energy use and standard benchmarks. Moreover, a sensitivity assessment has been carried out using different scenarios based on operation hours of building/equipment, boiler efficiency and impact of climate change. The analysis of these results showed high uncertainty in estimates of energy consumption. If carbon challenges are to be met then improved energy management techniques will require a more systematic approach so that facilities managers can identify energy streams and pinpoint problems, particularly where they have assumed responsibility for existing buildings which often have a legacy of poorly metered fuel consumption.

Thermal properties have significant impact on ecological footprint and life-cycle assessment of buildings. This is even more crucial aspect for glass buildings, which have been criticised as major factors in climate change around the world. Recent debates on glass facades, which culminated in plans for a “glass building ban” in New York City highlighted the importance of innovation in glass construction. The current solutions for mitigating energy consumption for glass facades are improving insulation (U-value) and solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) with advanced glazing or using shading devices. A fourth approach is the recent technology of water-filled glass (WFG), which utilizes water layer to improve thermal comfort and energy performance of the facade. This paper introduces Smart Water-filled Glass (SWFG) control method, which enables the change of the opacity of the facade element by colouring the fluid over a year regarding seasonal changes. The impact of changing transparency of water layer on cooling and heating energy demand is evaluated by simulating and analysing the energy performance of a reference office room with large glazing facade in different climates. The significance of this energy evaluation is that a water-filled glass with switchable transparency is simulated and assessed here for the first time. The paper analyses the performance in seven cities from all relevant major climatic regions using LBNL WINDOW and TRNSYS (v.18) As a novel approach, the simulation study makes it possible to evaluate the overall performance of two proposed operational methods (insolation-based & storage-based) for adjusting water layer settings depending on climate conditions and reusability of the captured heat in water layer. Moreover, seven different base cases are presented in this study to compare the performance of proposed system, including conventional solutions (e.g. double or triple glazing with/without shading) and a state-of-the-art switchable technology (e.g. electrochromic glazing or EC). The results verify the hypothesis that the impact of SWFG compared to WFG varies depending on the climate with 0%-5.28% for hot climates and 0.25–3.39% for climates with heating demand. The discussion includes comparison with standard glass facades, where SWFG shows 47.41%-78.01% energy savings depending on climate. The climate-based approach of SWFG and WFG offers a significant shift in facade design that sees glass buildings as an opportunity for sustainability rather than liability for climate change.

This paper presents the development, evaluation and application of a spatially referenced domestic building level framework (i.e. address level) to estimate domestic energy end-use demand baseline in sub-city areas. The paper core idea and conclusion is that unless knowledge and model estimating is available at an appropriate level, future UK local energy infrastructure planning will not be effective. Our framework innovatively combines a dataset, which includes detailed building surveys of 60,977 out of a total of 139,257 dwellings, with a normalised national dataset (i.e. the English Housing Survey) and applied to a BRE Domestic Energy Model (i.e. Cambridge Housing Model) so as to establish an energy consumption baseline for the domestic stock in localised areas of Newcastle upon Tyne. Our validation results show a poor alignment with existing observed data as published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), particularly at neighbourhood scale. Our belief is that as spatial resolution is increased, local building and urban socio-economic and physical characteristics play a more important part in the estimation of dwelling energy consumption. Thus, we propose a taxonomy to holistically deal with the sources of uncertainty arising from these issues and the components of our framework.

Global warming has drawn great attention in recent years because of its large impact on many aspects of the environment and human activities in buildings. One area directly affected by climate change is the energy consumption for heating and cooling. To quantify the impact, this study used the HadCM3 Global Circulation Model (GCM) to generate weather data for future typical meteorological years, such as 2020, 2050, and 2080, for 15 cities in the U.S. based on three CO 2 emission scenarios. The method was validated by comparing the projected TMY3 data using HadCM3 with the actual TMY3 data. By morphing method, the weather data was downscaled to hourly data for use in building energy simulations by EnergyPlus. Two types of residential buildings and seven types of commercial buildings were simulated for each of the 15 cities. This paper is the first to systematically study the climate change impact on various types of residential and commercial buildings in all seven climate zones in the U.S. through EnergyPlus simulations and provide weighted averaged results for national-wide building stock. We also identified geographical dependency of the impact of climate change on future energy uses. There would be a net increase in source energy consumption by the 2080s for climate zones 1–4 and net decrease in climate zones 6–7 based on the HadCM3 weather projection. Furthermore, this paper investigated natural ventilation performance in San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle with improved natural ventilation model. We found that by the 2080s passive cooling would not be suitable for San Diego because of global warming, but it would still be acceptable for San Francisco and Seattle.

Global awareness of environmental impacts such as climate change and depletion of ozone layer has increased significantly in the last few years and the implication for emissions reductions in buildings are widely acknowledged. The goal, therefore, is to design and construct buildings with minimum environ-mental impacts. Lifecycle emissions resulting from buildings consist of two components: operational and embodied emissions. A great deal of effort has been put into reducing the former as it is assumed that it is higher than the latter. However, studies have revealed the growing significance of embodied emissions in buildings but its importance is often underestimated in lifecycle emissions analysis. This paper takes a retrospective approach to critically review the relationship between embodied and operational emissions over the lifecycle of buildings. This is done to highlight and demonstrate the increasing proportion of embodied emissions that is one consequence of efforts to decrease operational emissions. The paper draws on a wide array of issues, including complications concerning embodied emissions computation and also discusses the benefits that come with its consideration. The implication of neglecting embodied emissions and the need for an urgent policy framework within the current climate of energy and climate change policies are also discussed.

Climate change has a dual implication on the built environment: on one hand human settlements and buildings are vulnerable to the effects of changing climate and on the other hand the building sector has a significant climate change mitigation potential. The relevant sustainable development and building policies as well as the building design, construction and maintenance strategies should jointly respond both to adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. What should city developers focus on in order to plan a sustainable and safe city in a changing climate? This paper provides answers to this question, presenting a bottom-up methodology based on a generalized building typology of the residential building stock in order to estimate the mitigation potential and vulnerability of the residential sector. During the research, a case study has been implemented in Hungary to assess the structural impacts and vulnerability on the roof, particularly with respect to the wind load and to estimate the potential decrease of CO2 emission through refurbishment. Through the case study the paper highlights the most problematic areas of the city both from vulnerability and mitigation point of view where the attention of the city developers should be turned.

Fossil fuel energy use in heating and cooling buildings is considered to be a major contributor to observed climate change effects, so there is an environmental imperative to reduce energy use in buildings. We should also improve buildings’ energy efficiency on health grounds. Climate change is predicted to produce more frequent extreme weather events, while epidemiological evidence indicates relationships between ambient temperature and ill health. This points to the need for addressing both climate change itself and the way buildings mediate outdoor conditions, for the sake of vulnerable occupants. The UK government requires evidence in support of policy-making concerning energy use in buildings and consequences for health. This paper reviews epidemiological research to illustrate problems associated with measuring the direct health impact of indoor temperatures, for which evidence remains limited. Conventionally, temperature-related health effects are discussed in terms of seasonal excess deaths. The paper goes on to describe a population-based study in London that considers morbidity rather than mortality. A new methodology is developed that links the risk of cold homes with excess winter hospital episodes, demonstrating its potential for identifying small areas for priority action on improving domestic energy efficiency in terms of health as well as the environment.

Indoor climate control is a major energy demand everywhere. Design and operation of buildings and HVAC systems crucially depend on climate data and real-time meteorological conditions. Energy-efficient buildings also contribute to reduce air pollution and climate change in urban areas as well as regionally and globally. However, the effects of climate and weather on building energy management are still largely overlooked in practice. A main reason for this is the lack of tools for translating meteorological conditions into energy requirements. The combined impact of temperature, solar irradiation, wind and humidity on the energy balance of a building depends on the building itself, i.e., its design, orientation, HVAC system, mode of operation, maintenance, etc. The paper discusses different approaches to model this complex interplay and associated problems at the design as well as in the operation stages. Recent developments in Sweden are reported, including applications to urban planning, building design and real-time operation of buildings and energy systems. The impact of solar irradiation and wind, in addition to that of temperature, is demonstrated. Further, the paper discusses the significance of local site condition versus building characteristics.

There is growing evidence that terraced houses—thermally lightweight, well insulated, naturally ventilated with three exposed wall surfaces—are at risk of overheating, especially in south-eastern England. The aim of this study is to evaluate the building performance and develop a reliable building simulation, which will be employed in the second phase of the study: developing affordable and feasible passive design strategies to support the energy-efficient building systems of the construction industry. This paper reports on the results from the first phase of the study where a quantitative methodology, including indoor and outdoor environmental monitoring, in-situ measurements and building simulation modelling, was adopted. The performance of a case study was modelled and simulated via employing Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) software suite. The results from the base-case were analysed according to the adaptive thermal comfort of Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) Technical Memorandum 52 guidelines: The Limits of Thermal Comfort—Avoiding Overheating in European Buildings. The spaces studied within the case study house were observed to exceed the acceptable limits of thermal comfort; particularly, the large bedroom within this zone exceeded the upper limit for overheating up to 11 h daily. Furthermore, the results from the monitoring study indicate a high risk of summertime overheating across all the case study settings, especially during short-term peaks in outdoor temperatures. The main reasons for the problematic thermal performance were identified as well-insulated and fully air-tight building fabric, the lack of sufficient ventilation through the living spaces and excessive heat gains through the composite cladding material.

International audience; Heatwaves are responsible for many deaths due to hot weather. Natural ventilation is promoted as a cooling solution to reduce the impacts of climate change because of its energy-saving potential. This paper addresses the prediction of heat-related health risk situations in naturally ventilated dwellings, where indoor thermal conditions depend on external climate and occupant behaviour. Thus, the operating limits of a dwelling vary according to its dynamic thermal response to indoor and outdoor stresses. To secure a building design, a method to improve the prediction of heat-related health risks is proposed that links predicted percentage dissatisfied (PPD) and wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) indicators to distinguish a moderately warm situation from a heat stress situation (WBGT>29°C). Simulations are performed for a dwelling during the 2015 heatwave in Paris (France) to test the method. In the example, natural ventilation was found to reduce the indoor temperature, but there remains ambiguity regarding the ability of natural ventilation to provide moderate conditions. According to the scope of the ergonomic standards, "moderate thermal environment" and "heat stress" temperature ranges are not contiguous. Bridging of this gap requires establishing thermal comfort ranges and heat stress thresholds adapted to people according to their acclimatisation level and their sensitivity to heat.

The paper is focused on the evaluation of how the climate changes can influence the performance of buildings designed to be nearly zero energy (nZEB) and on the evaluation of the resilience in term of energy balance. A real case study is used; it is named BNZEB, a single-storey dwelling built in Benevento (South Italy, Mediterranean climate). With five-years monitored meteorological data, both a short-term and medium-term analysis is developed; the first one consists in the evaluation of the energy behavior compared to the first operating year. Then, the energy performance is evaluated considering the medium-term climate projections generated using the CCWorldWeatherGen tool. This analysis, with reference to the case study, suggests to designers and researchers that, in a typical Mediterranean climate, the reduction of the heating demand could compensate the increment in the cooling request. In the worst climatic scenario, the net primary energy could change from 25.4 kWh/m2 year (first year of life, 2017) to 19.5 kWh/m2 year (projection to 2050) with a rate of self-consumption of 85% (80% for 2017). However, a critical point is the operating period of the cooling system. Indeed, an indoor overheating problem could occur during the spring with operative temperature higher than 30 °C; this indicates that in future, the occupants will require higher number of operating hours with most frequent switch off. This could change the results of the energy balance, reducing, for instance, the imbalance between production and consumption that currently occurs in the intermediate periods.

In the wake of growing concern for climate change, heat waves and their potential health effects (McGeehin and Mirabelli, 2001) [37] have become a recurring phenomenon (Beniston, 2004; Fouillet et al., 2006) [8] , [21] . Extreme heat events in the USA are responsible for more deaths as compared to other weather events such as hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes and floods (Luber and McGeehin, 2008) [33] . Heat exposure in buildings has risen due to global warming in conjunction with other factors like urbanization and associated heat island effects (Kolokotroni et al., 2012) [25] , lack of thermal mass (Lomas and Porritt, 2017a) [31] , exposure to solar insolation on higher stories, absence of window shading, overcrowding and envelope properties exacerbate the overheating inside the dwellings (Vellei et al., 2017). [45] . Stone et al. (2021) [43] provides a macro view of the indoor environments in buildings due to the concurrent event of power outage during heat wave in face of climate change. This paper builds on the previous publication and provides a detailed view of modeling methodology, building physics that explains the sources/sinks of heat and entails a detailed evaluation of the current building stock for the low to moderate income residences in the city of Phoenix, Arizona in terms of their thermal performance. Finite Element models of building stock were simulated using MATLAB for microclimate weather files of Phoenix generated by Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation. Significant differences in temperature were noted in same building archetypes in different pockets of the city indicating the role of urbanization in aggravating the impact of heat wave. Dwellings with high thermal mass are found to be much more resilient to high ambient temperatures as compared to code compliant residences with basements being the coolest zones in all prototypes.

Producción Científica, Over the last few years, studies have predicted an increase in the overall air temperature due to climate change. Today’s society is already sensing this change, which could have a negative impact on the envi- ronment and effort s are being made to seek all possible measures to curb it. One of the consequences of this temperature rise would be its effect on indoor comfort within buildings, which may cause higher energy consumption and operational costs, while reducing the useful lifetime of air-conditioning equip- ment. In this paper, an existing zero energy building (ZEB) is being studied to understand the possible effects of climate change on its zero energy status. The building is also a zero carbon building because all of its generated energies come from renewable sources (biomass, geothermal and solar photovoltaic systems). The building LUCIA has the highest innovative technologies in energy systems, design and con- struction elements and is currently considered as one of the top three buildings with the highest LEED certification in the world. According to current European regulations, buildings will tend to become self- sufficient in terms of energy after 2020, and therefore this study will help us to understand the changes in energy consumption within a long-term timeframe, for such zero-energy buildings. With the aid of the Design Builder version 5 software and its EnergyPlus building energy engine, a building model is simu- lated and energy consumption is analyzed for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080 timeframe. The climatic conditions pertain to the city of Valladolid, Spain, which has a continental climate, while the expected changes in climatic conditions have been produced through the methodology developed by the University of Southampton, called CCworldweathergen. Results have shown that the cooling demand would significantly increase for the years 2050 and 2080, while space heating would drop. This will increase the overall demand for burning more biofu- els to cover the added demand in absorption cooling systems. Moreover, the previously excess generated electricity of the building by photovoltaics would then be totally consumed within the building due to increased demand. This implies that the installed systems will operate for longer hours, which will in- crease maintenance and replacement costs. As a result of this study, it becomes possible to quantify the expected changes in energy consumption and prepare preventive actions to anticipate this change, while improving the management and control of both the energy systems and the building.

This paper investigates the climate change impact on cooling energy consumption of office buildings in four major architectural climate zones in China. The results show that there are apparent differences in the responses of monthly or yearly cooling loads to climatic change in different climates. Dominant factors affecting monthly cooling loads change from dry bulb temperature (DBT) to wet bulb temperature (WBT) with the climate zones changing from severe cold to hot. The yearly cooling load was mainly afftectd by DBT in severe cold climate, whereas the WBT had the dominant effect in the other climates. With the continuous warming climate, the yearly cooling load did not rise significantly for any climate zone except for severe cold climate zone where cooling load had a significant increase (p

Buildings are significant drivers of climate change, generating one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. When new buildings are constructed to high performance standards, increased rates of building replacement spurred by rising property values can raise the operating efficiency of building stocks. However, it can take years before the embodied greenhouse gas emissions associated with new construction are offset by more efficient operations. This paper calculates the carbon dioxide emission payback period of newly constructed efficient single family homes in Vancouver, British Columbia. The average carbon dioxide emission payback period of 168 years for a typical high efficiency new home renders it unlikely that emission savings will be realized before it is replaced. A statistical model called the Teardown Index is presented, which indicates that replacing older poorly performing homes with new high efficiency homes in Vancouver will result in 1.3–2.8 million tonnes of additional carbon dioxide equivalent emissions between 2017 and 2050. For each percent increase to the compound annual growth rate of property values, an additional 150 thousand tonnes of CO2e will be released between 2017-2050. The findings suggest that current policies aimed at reducing emissions through new high efficiency buildings should be reconsidered.

This paper explores whether the policy of mitigating climate change through energy-efficient retrofitting supports more balanced development or increases regional disparities. The issue is explored through the estimation of the socioeconomic effects of energy-efficient renovation across Croatian regions. The regional input–output model is applied to identify direct, indirect, and induced effects of building retrofit investments on gross value added and employment. In the Croatian case, over three-quarters of the total economic effects of energy-efficient retrofitting is distributed to the more developed region of Continental Croatia. Economic activity in the Adriatic region is strongly dependent on tourism with insufficient local production of the manufacturing products required in energy renovation projects, and a certain proportion of spillover effect of the investment is transferred to Continental Croatia. The positive economic effects induced by retrofit investments are most present in construction, manufacturing, trade, and transport. Results suggest that climatic conditions and regional economic specialisation have an impact on the dispersion of the economic effects of retrofit measures in different regions.

Average air temperatures in the Mediterranean region are in the thermal comfort zone for human beings in summer. However, irradiation conditions, construction technologies and subjective comfort expectations are dramatically increasing the cooling demand in buildings, exacerbated by the ambient temperature increase due to the climate change and the urban heat island phenomenon. This paper investigates the impact of the urban environment on the energy and thermal response of residential buildings, considering the case of the city of Rome, Italy. Ambient air temperature and relative humidity were continuously measured in four neighborhoods in 2015 and 2016. The monitored neighborhoods are characterized by: location in the urban area; construction materials for buildings and pavements; geometry of the urban texture. Data were also measured by a non-urban station, used as undisturbed reference. The climatic data were then used to calculate the thermal response of a typical Italian residential building, ideally located in the monitored areas of the city. Two envelope configurations were taken into account: with and without thermal insulation. Heat island intensities up to 8 °C was detected, with maximum monthly averages equal to 2 °C. The urban heat island increases the building cooling energy needs by 12% in the peripheral neighborhood and by up to 46% in the city center, respect to the undisturbed zone. For not cooled buildings, it was found out that the number of hours of thermal discomfort remains significant in urban buildings, despite the application of night ventilation strategies, while comfort conditions are mostly reached for buildings in the countryside.

The building sector is well known as one of the significant contributors to climate change. The use of materials and energy are important drivers, both during construction and the whole life cycle. This study is part of a research to improve the Belgian national approach of life cycle environmental assessment for buildings. The current approach focusses mainly on material use, and the operational energy is estimated via the equivalent degree day method assuming a fixed value of 1200 equivalent heating degree days per year. This paper extends this widespread degree day approach to improve its accuracy by including the effect of various parameters (climate, building characteristics, obstructions by the environment, occupant behaviour). Step by step user-friendly input and graphical feedback is moreover considered necessary for designers and has been added. The annual heating energy estimated by our proposed semi-dynamic model has been validated by dynamic energy simulations using EnergyPlus of 8000 randomly generated cases. Both results have been plotted in a 2D graph. The slope of the linear regression through the origin is 0.8955, and the R-square value is 0.9058. Based on this comparison, it is concluded that the semi-dynamic model, with simplified input and fast results, has sufficient accuracy for the first design phases compared to the dynamic model.

Driven by the necessity to design resilient and prosperous cities and to counteract the impacts of climate change, this study aims to shed light on the interactions between microclimate, urban built environment, and the outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) conditions at a university campus in Trondheim, Norway. This paper calls into question up to which degree four typical microclimatic design solutions can enhance OTC in high-latitude areas which are generally characterized by strong seasonal variability in meteorological conditions, particularly in solar radiation. An on-site measurement campaign in autumn 2019 for the validation of numerical simulations with ENVI-met were carried out. Solar access proved to be the key parameter to improve OTC by a Predicted Mean Vote of up to 1.0 in the investigated climatic situation. Moreover, wind sheltering resulted in an increase of OTC, although not as pronounced and on a smaller spatial scale. Changing the buildings’ surface material resulted in no significant changes in microclimatic conditionsAt a higher wind speed (8 m/s), wind sheltering becomes more effective in improving OTC than solar access. This study underlines the importance of microclimatic assessments in order to understand the effect of different interventions with the urban environment on OTC at high‐latitude urban settlements. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Seasonal variation of thermal comfort demands directly affects the energy needs for heating or cooling purpose. In previous studies, the differences of neutral temperatures between summer and winter were revealed, but the studies on the difference of human thermal adaption in transitional seasons are insufficient. To clarify this, this paper presents a year-long survey which was carried out in 505 residential buildings in six cities located in the Hot Summer and Cold Winter (HSCW) zone of China involving 11,524 subjects. Results show a significant difference of adaptive responses in different seasons, and a lag of behavioral responses behind climate change in transitional seasons is observed. Occupants not only adjust clothing insulation according to air temperature in different seasons, but also actively control indoor air movement, including closing/opening windows and using fans. The seasonal, monthly and daily neutral temperatures are studied, implying that occupants’ thermal experience has significant effect on their thermal comfort by behavioral, physiological and psychological paths. According to the comparative study, the running mean air temperature method and aPMV model are recommended in free-running space. The findings provide scientific evidence to the concept that dynamic thermal comfort temperature range should be considered in evaluation of indoor thermal environment.

In light of current climate change projections in recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the assessment of indoor overheating in domestic environments in previously heating-dominated climates. This paper presents a monitoring study of overheating in 122 London dwellings during the summers of 2009 and 2010. Dry Bulb Temperature and Relative Humidity in the main living and sleeping area were monitored at 10 min intervals. The ASHRAE Standard 55 adaptive thermal comfort method was applied, which uses outdoor temperature to derive the optimum indoor comfort temperature. It was found that 29% of all living rooms and 31% of all bedrooms monitored during 2009 had more than 1% of summertime occupied hours outside the comfort zone recommended by the standard to achieve 90% acceptability. In 2010, 37% of monitored living rooms and 49% of monitored bedrooms had more than 1% of summertime occupied hours outside this comfort zone. The findings of this study indicate that London dwellings face a significant risk of overheating under the current climate. Occupant exposure to excess indoor temperatures is likely to be exacerbated in the future if climate change adaptation strategies are not incorporated in Building Regulations, building design and retrofit.

With the growing concern of global climate change in the future, how building energy use pattern would change in response is of great interest and importance in drafting future building performance regulations and codes. In this paper, the outputs from global climate model (GCM) are integrated to typical meteorological year weather file to downscale and predict local hourly weather data in the context of U.S. climate regions using a “morphing” methodology. The “morphed” future hourly weather data is then used by EnergyPlus to predict future energy use pattern for residential building in the United States. Case studies in four representative cities in the U.S. show that climate change is to have great impacts on residential and office building energy use during the year of 2040–2069. The change of annual energy use is predicted to range from −1.64% to 14.07% for residential building and from −3.27% to −0.12% for office building under A2 scenario (a carbon emission scenarios defined by IPCC) in different regions. The research results suggest that the climate change will narrow the gap of energy use for residential buildings located in cold and hot climate regions in the U.S. and generally reduce office building energy use in the future. It is also found that the energy use of lightings and fans will slightly decrease in the future. Moreover, the growing peak electricity load during cooling seasons is going to exert greater pressure for the future grid.

Energy-efficient buildings, made of ecologically acceptable materials, are result of a worldwide ecological awareness induced by ever growing concern in regard to climate changes and economic aspects of long term energy savings. Complexities regarding energy-efficiency, economy and traditional construction of residential family homes led to acceptance of new building materials and forming of several typical wall types in south-eastern European region. This paper offers an energy performance analysis and a life cycle assessment of three common outer wall types: prefabricated timber-frame, an aerated autoclaved concrete and a solid brick wall with two model heating regimes. In order to verify energy and environmental performance of each wall type in a complete building, a detached house model was determined with the same parameters used for comparison. Model performances were determined for the selected life cycle stages and system boundaries during an eighty year period taken as a service life of family houses and compared to conventional and passive houses performances found in literature. Analysis results show that the model with aerated autoclaved concrete wall has the best environmental performance and that model with masonry brick walls has the best thermal performance in discontinuous heating mode of the three analysed walls.

Considering climate change, controlling outdoor microclimates is an increasingly pressing concern. Microclimates have a significant effect on both outdoor and indoor comfort, and on the energy efficiency of buildings. This concern is particularly important as current climate conditions reveal that warmer summers are threatening the comfort of pedestrians and causing overheating in office environments, which is consequently increasing cooling energy consumption. A further concern is that this trend now extends to Nordic latitudes. Existing literature demonstrates how a local microclimate depends on many factors such as urban density, shape and orientation of buildings, the types of materials present, the number of green areas and anthropogenic activities. However, there is little research focusing on how reciprocal distances among tall buildings, and their relative position, affect outdoor and indoor comfort, and the associated energy consumption of buildings. This paper presents a unique and comprehensive insight into the interconnected nature of indoor and outdoor comfort via coupled simulations. It presents a study of clusters of tall commercial buildings located in the Nordic climate of Tallinn (Estonia) with different microclimates, and shows that the differences are due to variable shadowing and reflections and different wind patterns. The results, which focus on summer conditions, show that small variations of cluster layout strongly affect the local indoor and outdoor comfort, thus highlighting the need to conduct both studies simultaneously in research aiming to increase pedestrian and indoor comfort and resource efficiency.

This paper introduces a physically-based model to simulate interactions between a building and its outdoor conditions at the urban microscale. In the model, the building is simulated with EnergyPlus while its outdoor conditions are assessed from OpenFOAM. Furthermore, the model simulates the street pavement and surrounding buildings based on the lumped thermal theory. All components of the model are quasi-dynamically co-simulated. Through simulations of the model, waste heat releases from a cooling system can be observed with a higher resolution than this achieved by most urban microclimate models in the literature. Unlike several methods in the literature, the model evaluates a countermeasure to urban heat islands by considering direct and indirect effects simultaneously. To validate the model, measurements were collected during a field experiment in an university campus. Comparing measurements to estimates, the model seems to properly approximate the outdoor temperature and the air motion. However, a discrepancy is observed between estimates and measurements of the surface temperature. The discrepancy could be minimised if a better consideration of the net-longwave radiation was possible when co-simulating EnergyPlus. After some improvements, the model could become a support tool to mitigate urban heat islands and climate change in different regions of the world.

Heat-related mortality (HRM) is increasing because of the climate change and urbanization leading to extreme heat events. This paper summarizes the results of the excess mortality attributed to excessive heat events in two largest cities in Canada, Toronto and Montreal, during three heat wave periods. We present an application of a fine-resolution, urban-mesoscale model to assess the impacts of heat and heat mitigation strategy on heat death. The Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) is coupled with a multi-layer of the Urban Canopy Model (ML-UCM) to assess the impacts of heat and heat mitigation strategy on heat -related death. The background albedo of 0.2 for urban surfaces are respectively increased to 0.65, 0.60, and 0.45 for roofs, walls, and grounds. The changes of the air mass category, ambient and apparent temperatures interpret the impacts of extreme heat and the potential of increasing surface albedo (ISA) on HRM. Here, the calculations and estimations of HRM is based on the data obtained from Canadian Environmental Health Atlas (CEHA) indicating an average of 120 heat-induced deaths in Toronto and Montreal. ISA affords a reduction in air temperature (1–2 °C), a decrease in dew point temperature (0.2–0.5 °C), and a slight increase in near-surface wind speed (−0.01 to −0.4 m/s). Increase in albedo shifts days into more benign conditions by nearly 60%. The HRM will lessen by 3–7%, pointing that seven to eighteen lives could be saved. Cooling the urban climate will improve discomfort index, lessen the impacts of elevated temperature, enhance human thermal comfort, and decrease HRM to some significant extent.

Climatic conditions can exert significant impacts on energy demand of residential buildings. Therefore, case-based evidence is necessary for aiding local policy making on building energy performance. By designing and carrying out in-situ monitoring campaigns respectively in Cambridge, Hong Kong and Shanghai, we present in this paper a cross-regional analysis of actual building envelope performance in these three climatic regions that operate under different energy efficiency policies. Compared with conventional tabulated data, information gleaned from the method of in-situ monitoring shows lower uncertainty and higher precision, especially when the wall has good thermal properties. By comparing practices in different regions and with accurate post-occupancy thermal data, the analytical results further show that the effectiveness of building-related policies on energy performance varies across regions. This is one of the pioneering studies that make interactive policy recommendations based on the evidence obtained from cross-regional, in-situ monitoring campaigns.

Achieving low carbon buildings is seen as a key concept in order to reduce carbon emission and mitigate climate change. In contrast to operational emission, material related embodied carbon (EC) in the built environment plays a pivotal role, with the continuous consumption of high carbon emitting materials. This research relates to the ‘Cradle-to-Gate’ system boundary, while limiting its focus on building design stage decisions. A hybrid analysis approach was adopted - a bottom-up process with steps encompassing mass analysis, EC calculation, highlighting carbon hotspots, and ultimately the identification of critical building components. As a case study, multi-storey housing was selected as a critical building typology, in Sri Lanka. The results reveal ‘walls’ as a carbon hotspot that needs to be explored in strategies for mitigation. Substantial EC savings were seen in the selection of fly ash blocks as an alternate material to clay brick or cement block. Changes to the configuration of walls, specifically, bonding patterns and non-inclusion of a plaster layer, also showed savings. This paper, contributes to the understanding of material selection implications - in the cradle-to-gate stage - for the reduction of carbon emissions in mid-rise housing, in the context of Sri Lanka.

The paper presents a methodological approach, called “BOttom-up Harmonized Energy-Environmental Models for Europe” (BOHEEME), that combines bottom-up modeling, energy dynamic simulation, and life cycle assessment for evaluating and comparing the energy and environmental effects of different renovation strategies of the residential EU building stocks, from micro to the macro level. The study defines 672 building models representative of the residential EU-28 building stocks built before 2010, called archetypes, and the improvement of their envelope, applying different insulation materials from a traditional one to bio-based materials and studying their environmental effects via LCA. The results show that the only improvement of the vertical envelope could reduce the environmental impacts on the residential sector operation of about 6–19% in all the environmental impact categories accounted. Moreover, it could reduce in 2050 about 20% of the CO2eq emission due to the heating and cooling demand and about 13% of the climate change impacts connected to the EU residential energy consumption. The approach and the models proposed could be used for future improvement strategies of all the European residential building stocks, allowing stakeholders, policy-makers, and agencies for identifying the best renovation action.

Building energy optimisation is generally performed under present climate conditions with fixed simulation parameters (e.g. internal loads). However, climate change and variations in simulation parameters over the building’s life span may impact the optimised design. A key question is whether a particular energy-optimised design under present climate conditions would remain energy-optimised in the future. Accordingly, in this paper, a new simulation-based optimisation method is developed, which uses climate models and Ant Colony Optimisation to compare the energy-optimised designs under present and future climates. To demonstrate its potential, this method is applied to a typical office building in two Australian cities, Brisbane and Canberra. The results show that optimising under future climate conditions can lead to different optimal building designs. For Brisbane, the energy difference between optimising under present and future climate conditions is small, but in Canberra the cooling load is increased by up to 6%. This suggests that optimising the studied office building under present climate conditions is acceptable for Brisbane, while considering future climate may yield some savings in Canberra. Results also show that the energy-optimised building configuration for both future and present climates in Brisbane is less sensitive to changes in the load scenario than in Canberra.

Cooling of buildings currently represents a considerable fraction of the total energy consumption in the world. Global and local climate change in combination with the projected population increase and economic development is expected to increase tremendously the future cooling energy demand of buildings and make it the dominant energy component. The present paper aims to present and discuss the details of the framework which defines the present and future cooling energy consumption of the building sector. The more recent quantitative and qualitative data concerning the penetration of air conditioning around the world are presented and analyzed. The main technological, economic, environmental and social drivers that determine the market penetration of air conditioning are identified and their impact is investigated. The potential future evolution of the main parameters that define the cooling energy consumption and in particular climate change, the population increase, income growth, potential technological improvements and the main socioeconomic drivers are investigated and existing forecasts are presented. Proposed methodologies to predict the future cooling energy consumption of the building sector are reported and discussed, while existing estimates and predictions regarding the future cooling energy consumption of individual buildings as well as of the total building sector are documented, evaluated and analyzed. Based on the explored inputs and forecasts, a model to predict the future cooling energy consumption of both the residential and commercial sector is developed. Three scenarios based on low, average and high future development, compared to the current development, are created and the range of the expected cooling energy demand in 2050 is predicted under various boundary assumptions. It is calculated that the average cooling energy demand of the residential and commercial buildings in 2050, will increase up to 750% and 275% respectively.

In light of growing concerns about climate change and energy conservation, the adaptive thermal comfort theory has become a research focus. However, to date, few about the dynamic process of human thermal adaptation has been explored. In this paper, we ask the question as to whether people accustomed to one indoor climate can readapt to another one? And what about the timescale and difficulty of thermal re-adaptation? A comparative study was conducted in China where wintertime indoor thermal environments remarkably varied between the northern region (with pervasive district heating) and southern region (without district heating). Four college student groups were surveyed in teaching buildings and over 2000 valid responses were collected. The results show that occupants’ subjective thermal comfort perception is strongly influenced by their previous thermal experience. People accustomed to indoor climate excellence are able to readapt themselves to environments with lesser quality, however, the adapting process may take some time. The effort of this study shed some light on the dynamic process of human thermal adaptation, which is helpful to shape the future indoor climate.

Climate scientists have developed and refined climate change models on a global scale. One of the aims of these models is to predict the effects of human activities on climate, and thus the delivery of information that is useful to devise mitigation actions. Moreover, if they can be properly downscaled to a regional and local level, they might be useful to deliver support for adaptation actions. For example, they may be used as an input for the better design of the features of buildings in order to make them resilient to climate modification, e.g., able to passively control heat flows to produce comfortable indoor conditions not only in the present climate, but also in future climate conditions. Taking into account the future weather scenarios that show an increase in the global temperature and climate severity, a likely consequence on building energy use will be a substantial shift from space heating to space cooling, and potentially uncomfortable thermal conditions during the summer will became a major challenge, both for new and existing buildings. In this paper, a deep energy retrofit of a child care centre located in Milan (Italy) is analysed on the basis of future weather scenarios; the analysis aims to identify to what extent choices that are made nowadays on the basis of a typical meteorological year may succeed to provide acceptable energy and indoor environmental performance throughout the future decades. The analysis confirms that climate change might require the installation of active cooling systems to compensate for harsher summer conditions over a long-term horizon, however, in the mid-term, passive cooling strategies combined with envelope refurbishment may still guarantee thermally comfortable conditions, and they will reduce energy cooling needs when active cooling is eventually installed.

Climate change would affect the building energy demand in the future. Building simulation is a feasible way to quantitatively evaluate this impact. Since the detailed weather is dispensable for the building simulation, it is important to predict the weather data for the future. Given that the uncertainties and limitations of GCMs on regional-scale weather prediction, an alternative method of future weather data generation for future building energy demand simulation is proposed in this paper. Based on the long-/short-term climate periodicity analysis, a Dual-Periodic Time Series Model is established to predict the future monthly temperatures in Shanghai. From the fitting results and the preliminary assessment analysis, it is observed that the alternative forecasting method and the corresponding Dual-Periodic TSM has better capability of characterizing and predicting performance for both recent and future temperature trends in Shanghai than GCM under RCP4.5. In this case, this method can be used as an alternative and supplementary way to the widely used GCM. With consideration of three composite uncertainty scenarios, we convert the predicted monthly temperatures into hourly TMYs by using Morphing method. Using the future TMYs as the weather input of prototypical building models of Shanghai, we can see that the simulated building energy demand presents fluctuant trends in the future periods, different from the continuous uptrends of that using IPCC RCP4.5.

Historic artefacts must be properly preserved if they are to be transmitted to future generations. Indeed, several methodologies and guidelines that aim to safeguard artefacts by limiting the ranges in which the indoor temperature and relative humidity vary exist, which means energy consumption. This paper aims to quantify the energy consumption associated to three different setpoints and respective financial cost, as well as their future trend to demonstrate the positive outcome of passive retrofit measures, since they will be responsible for decreasing the building's energy consumption and mitigating the effects of climate change in artefacts’ preservation. A validated whole-building hygrothermal model of a historic building was used coupled to climate change weather files to obtain the expected future indoor conditions for three types of climates, which were also assessed using a risk-based analysis. The positive potential of passive retrofit measures on the building's energy consumption was shown, but the risk-based analysis showed that the measures performance are not universal since, for example, whilst the selected measures decrease the risk of chemical decay for Seville, they have the contrary behaviour for Oslo. To achieve these goals more than 1400 simulations were run in WUFI®Plus, which took more than 1600 h. authorsversion published

Estimates of the non-CO2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contributed by the buildings sector are necessary to evaluate this sector's potential for climate change mitigation. As data is lacking on fluorinated gases (F-gases) and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) emissions from the buildings sector, this study aimed to estimate these emissions. First, the share of total global GHG emissions represented by buildings sector emissions was estimated. Then, the HFC emissions of the buildings sectors in several countries (USA, EU, Japan, and China) are compiled. Next, based on necessary assumptions, global buildings sector HFC emissions were estimated. Finally, this paper discusses implications for policy-makers. This study was conducted by Dr. Shan Hu with support from National Key R&D Program of China 'Research and Intergrated Demonstration on Suitable Technology of Net Zero Energy Building' (Grant No. 2019YFE0100300), the Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51908311), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2019M660654). Dr. Cabeza would like to thank the Catalan government for the quality accreditation given to her research group GREiA (2017 SGR 1537). GREiA is certified TECNIO agent in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. This work was partially supported by ICREA under the ICREA Academia Programme.

The aim of this paper is to gain new knowledge on contributions of energy renovation of multi apartment buildings to economy and climate changes. The research methodology is based on applying the input–output model, which enables the analysis of direct, indirect and induced effects. The analysis was conducted on the sample of the Republic of Croatia. The reference research period is from 2017 to 2020. The results obtained confirm the existence of indirect socioeconomic effects of energy recovery projects which were justified by being co-funded from national budgets or EU structural funds. The growth induced by gross value added and employment positively effects the revenue from taxes and contributions, and by co-financing energy renovations they do not disturb the stability of public finances. The energy renovation of multi apartment buildings increases the energy sufficiency of the domestic economy due to the fact that the need for imported energy decreases throughout the entire life of the investment. A decrease in import dependency decreases the sensitivity of the economy from possible negative effects of the disorder on the world market of energy products. The obtained results show positive effects of energy renovation of multi apartment buildings on climate changes, primarily through the decrease of the amount of energy consumption in an energy renovated area and the decrease of harmful particle emission (CO2).

The weather data is essential to simulation-based building energy studies. The weather data should render the features of the changing climate. The typical meteorological year (TMY) developments using the long-term climate data, however, may weaken the impact of the recent climate change and the corresponding building energy responses. This paper studies the changes of the climate data (by ground measurements) and their impacts on the simulation results of the subtropical Hong Kong over 37 years. The climate changes for solar radiation, temperature and wind speed were summarised, and their daily total, average, extreme, and/or deviation values were presented. The typical weather data developed by the ground measurements of different times and period lengths (within the 37 years) determined the cooling load of a representative building in the Hong Kong, and the outcomes were compared to that of the yearly data. The period (length) of the raw measurements and the update frequency of TMY were optimized for the building energy simulations in the changing climate.

In the last decade, building energy simulation (BES) became a central component in building energy systems’ design and optimization. For each building location, BES requires one year of hourly weather data. Most buildings are designed to last 50+ years, consequently, the building design phase should include BES with future weather files considering climate change. This paper presents a comparative study of two methods to produce future climate hourly data files for BES: Morphing and typical meteorological year of future climate (F-TMY). The study uses data from a high-resolution (9 km) regional climate atmospheric model simulation of Iberia, spanning 10 years of historical and future hourly data. This study compares both methods by analyzing anomalies in air temperature, and the impact in BES predictions of annual and peak energy consumption for space heating, cooling and ventilation in 4 buildings. Additionally, this study performs a sensitivity analysis of morphing method. The analysis shows that F-TMY is representative of the multi-year simulation for BES applications. A high-quality Morphed TMY weather file has a similar performance compared to F-TMY (average difference: 8% versus 7%). Morphing based on different baseline climates, low-grid resolution and/or outdated climate projections leads to BES average differences of 16%-20%.

The world is urbanizing rapidly and under the business-as-usual scenario, energy needs in cities will also increase dramatically. Urban population is expected to double by 2030; however the global built-up area is expected to triple during the same period (Angel et al. (2005) [1] ). This building out instead of building up will dramatically increase energy requirements and costs of new infrastructure and will influence the link between cities and climate change; to this end, the timely monitoring of the built-up area features and dynamics is considered supportive for defining temporal and spatial changes in energy needs and thus facilitate changes in urban design and support adaptation and mitigation plans in cities for climate change. In this paper the capacity of indices based on Earth Observation, to support the assessment of the built-up area features and dynamics is discussed and assessed. It is found that such indices can provide timely and accurate depiction of the built-up features and dynamics, including urban sprawl. It is also found that built-up area dynamics relate to the spatial and temporal variation of the discomfort index; this is an important parameter for defining urban energy needs as the higher the discomfort index, the more demanding the energy needs for cooling.

Phase change materials (PCM) are known as an effective technology to store larger amounts of thermal energy per unit mass than conventional thermal mass building materials such as concrete and stone. They add thermal stability to lightweight constructions without adding physical mass. This paper presents a method to assess the effect of PCMs on thermal comfort and energy consumption in UK dwellings in summer months. A methodology is presented to assess the impact of climate change temperature increases in the UK by considering current, 2020, 2050 and 2080 weather scenarios using the dynamic thermal simulation software DesignBuilder, which employs EnergyPlus as its calculation engine. The study used simulations of a high performance detached house model with a near Passivhaus standard in London, where the impact of climate change effect is predicted to be significant. It was shown that appropriate levels of PCM, with a suitable incorporation mechanism in to the building construction, has significant advantages for residential buildings in terms of reducing total discomfort hours and cooling energy loads.

Increase of the urban ambient temperature caused by local and global phenomena is probably the more incontestable incident of climate change. Urban warming has a very significant impact on human life increasing the energy consumption, deteriorating the comfort levels, increasing the pollution concentration, threatening the human health and affecting the urban economy. Mitigation technologies aiming to countermeasure the impact of the phenomenon are rapidly developed and applied in real scale projects. The present paper aims to present in a critical and comprehensive way the recent scientific knowledge on the causes of urban warming and also stress the main problems and inconsistencies concerning the experimental and the theoretical findings and analysis. In parallel, it classifies and summarizes the main knowledge on the energy, environmental, health and economic impacts of urban warming. Quantitative information on the energy penalties, mortality rates and environmental degradation induced by urban warming is presented. Finally, it presents the main developments regarding urban mitigation techniques and technologies and in particular, urban greenery and planted roofs, cool pavements, cool roofs and increase of the urban albedo, decrease of the anthropogenic heat and use of the ground as a sink for heat dissipation.

Evaluating the usefulness and the reliability of retrofitted buildings for future climate can be a challenging task, while different scenarios and uncertainties exist both for retrofitting buildings and future climate. This paper presents a method to assess and quantify the relative robustness of retrofitting measures on long term, while climate variations in different time scales, extreme conditions and uncertainties of climate change are considered. The applicability of the method is examined by comparing two energy retrofitting measures for the existing residential building stock of Stockholm, whose energy performance is numerically simulated during 1961-2100 for five climate scenarios. The considered climate uncertainties are due to downscaling climate data from five different global climate models. The relative robustness of the retrofitting measures are evaluated in five time scales; hourly, daily, monthly, annual and 20-year period. The presented method facilitates the assessment and ranking of retrofitting measures, using few numbers. It also generates an overall view about the relative performance of retrofitting measures in different time scales. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Thermal comfort is one of the many aspects that affect human well-being and productivity. There is an increasing interest in understanding occupants’ requirements for maintaining the indoor comfort range while minimizing energy wastage. In this paper, a thermal perception map was developed for residential buildings in the humid tropics of Malaysia using logistic regression. Sharma and Ali's [1] concept was used for the elaboration of the thermal comfort map. This map helps in exploring the effect of climate changes on subjects’ thermal perceptions at various indoor air temperatures. The thermal comfort map should be useful for researchers in order to accurately estimate the required energy for maintenance of comfortable temperature.