ReCOver++ project: wrap up

The increasing severity and duration of climate change is that extremes – notably heatwaves, increases the risk of human thermal stress in indoor environments where people spend most of their times. Recent field measurements have demonstrated significant overheating in the EU building stock in the EU, characterized by well-insulated and air-tight envelopes. This exposes vulnerable communities to increases mortality risks that is bound to only get worse with an ever-worsening climate warming. Moreover, heatwaves are often accompanied by other unexpected extreme events or “shocks” such as power outages, which can render some buildings unhabitable even long after these shocks are over. Thus, it is critical to design future-proof buildings and systems. This performance characteristic of a building is known as resilience to overheating. Currently, in practice, designers and architects are under-equipped to deal with such events due to a lack of knowledge on resilience performance characteristics and building design parameters that influence them. There is a lack of a framework in current building standards to consider resilience and shock events in the design stage of a building. This includes the lack of straightforward and “easy-to-communicate” resilience key performance indicators. By bringing together academic and industrial partners, the VLAIO ICON project ReCOver++ aims to bridge this knowledge gap and make resilience a more actionable concept for architects, engineering companies and manufacturers. ReCOver++ defines a new holistic resilience indicator relating resilience performance characteristics to the building and systems’ most influential parameters which aims to improve resilience to overheating. This session aims to communicate the results of the ReCOver++ project by presenting this novel indicator and discusses the implications of its use in practice.