Literature Review on Metrics to Assess the Thermal Resilience of Buildings to Climate Change

Abstract

The extreme weather events related to climate change, which have experienced an increase in the frequency and severity in the past two decades, pose a fundamental threat to cities that are often unable to cope with them. The path to achieving greater resilience of cities is strongly characterized by the role that buildings, as key nodes of the urban texture, can play in this regard. However, regarding particularly the concept of building thermal resilience (i.e. against rising temperatures and temperature extremes), to date there is still some confusion on how it should be interpreted, concretized, and evaluated. Such confusion is mostly associated with the absence of an univocal way of interpreting this concept. To try to bring some clarity to this topic, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of building thermal resilience assessment methods, through an extensive literature review, highlighting the various metrics currently available. The performed analysis enabled the identification of the most widely used and representative metrics in the area of thermal resilience of buildings, each one requiring a specific set of input parameters. The outcome of the present study can represent an initial basis for the evaluation of the thermal resilience of buildings, and in particular for defining a user-friendly and reliable set of operational indicators to quantify the enhancement that, eventually, mitigation and adaptation measures undertaken in a building can hopefully bring.