What is the Role Played by Building Habitants on Building Resilience Against Climate Change?

Abstract

Climate change is a serious threat for the well- being and health of people. As global predictions increasingly point to a warmer world with more frequent and severe heatwaves, it is crucial to design buildings that are not only comfortable and energy-efficient but also resilient to global warming and extreme weather events. The study investigates the role attributed to occupants by the existing literature inherent in climate resilience of buildings. To this end, a systematic and extensive literature search has been performed. The analysis showed that despite occupants are mostly covered, their ability to adapt to heat physiologically, psychologically and through behaviors is only minimally considered in the reviewed studies. Considerations on how occupants, thanks to their adaptive behavior, can positively contribute to making the building less vulnerable to extreme heat events and thus can increase its resilience are also delivered together with a list of heat adaptation behaviors frequently reported in the literature on the subject. The importance of designing buildings that encourage occupants to practice their adaptation capacity is thus highlighted as well as its integration into the building simulation process. Based on these findings, it is suggested that in future stages of research, a tool to measure the level of adaptation to heatwaves of building occupants is developed as well as a kind of “resilience dashboard” for assessing the resilience performance of buildings incorporating occupant heat adaptation capacity in addition to the envelope and air conditioning systems contributions. The identified heat adaptive behaviors might represent a preliminary useful guide/basis for the development of these tools.