climate change

There is a pressing need for large-scale energy retrofits in domestic dwellings to reduce carbon emissions. However, these retrofit strategies must be carefully balanced against the embodied carbon, operational energy, and indoor environmental quality in dwellings. This research aims to analyse the implications of indoor environmental quality arising from energy retrofit scenarios in the Irish context. Building physics simulations will determine a range of pre and post-energy retrofit scenarios and address the implications under various scenarios.

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.

The EIA EBC Annex 80 Resilient Cooling program has focused on bringing together and extending the knowledge on the resilience of buildings to overheating (Holzer, 2024).  In the context of the Annex 80 Resilient Cooling program a research project, Recover++, has been setup to define a new resilience indicator, based on the properties and behaviour of real-world building projects under extreme climatological condition and shocks, as heatwaves under current and future weather conditions.

This study explored the design optimization possibilities for Danish retirement homes while considering an increased risk of overheating due to elevated temperatures imposed by climate change. The focus was on combinations of design features and technical components ensuring thermal comfort and daylight. The study used a dynamic simulation tool to consider the current Danish design reference year and future climate predictions.

The paper introduces an approach for assessing the resilience of buildings to both current heat waves and their recurrence in the future under the impact of climate change. The method, applied to the 60,000 dwellings of the RIVP (Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris), the second-largest social landlord in Paris, aims to provide reliable information to enable the buildings’ owner to assess the heat-related health risk for the tenants and the actions to be taken to decrease it.

Naturally ventilated (NV) buildings, when well designed and operated, can provide adequate indoor environmental quality (IEQ) while reducing the building energy demand. However, in dusty outdoor air, this ventilation technique may increase the penetration of outdoor particulate matter (PM) indoors, leading to adverse health effects. Given the increasing frequency of outdoor dust episodes in Mediterranean climates, an important research question is whether NV buildings can provide adequate indoor air quality (IAQ) during increased outdoor air dust episodes.

Nowadays, due to climate change, heatwaves become stronger in terms of frequency and intensity. This phenomenon can have serious impact on the indoor environments, indoor thermal comfort and on public health. These situations of high indoor thermal conditions can expose the occupants to health risks such as hyperthermia, dehydration, and heat strokes. Then, the estimation of these risks is crucial. The currently used indices to estimate health risks such as WBGT, HSI and PHS are generally dedicated to outdoor environments and for subjects exerting heavy activities.

Due to climate change, Western Europe is experiencing a surge in cooling demand, leading to higher summer temperatures accompanied by longer and stronger heat waves, thereby intensifying the toll on our buildings. This signals the need for architects to design buildings that take advantage of passive technics to provide thermal comfort. In recent years, natural ventilation has become a widely used method for reducing energy consumption and expenses. However, the utilization of natural ventilation can be restricted due to heatwaves and the impacts of climate change.

Urban settings and climate change both impact energy use, thermal comfort and ventilation of buildings. This is more noticeable in hot urban areas where the urban heat island effect is more pronounced; also, in densely built urban areas where thermal comfort in naturally ventilated buildings is affected by changes in natural ventilation rates because of surrounding obstructions. In some cases, overshadowing might alleviate the impact.