Objective To assess whether non-polluting, more effective home heating (heat pump, wood pellet burner, flued gas) has a positive effect on the health of children with asthma.

While the efficacy of salvaging underutilised historical buildings to promote sustainable and resilient provincial urban areas in New Zealand has been identified from past studies, there is still an absence of a performancebased framework to rank optimal historical building alternatives for adaptive reuse interventions. This paper focuses on evaluating a performance-based Multiple Criteria Decision Assessment (MCDA) methodology to prioritise underutilised historical buildings for adaptive reuse intervention in a major provincial area in New Zealand, towards achieving a resilient town-centre regeneration for the area.A focus group workshop was conducted with relevant stakeholders involved in an existing town centre regeneration agenda for Whanganui, to explore and balance their opinions for optimal selection of a vacant historical building for adaptive reuse intervention from a group of proposed buildings. The participant mix comprised a combination of building professionals, historical building owners/developers/users, legal, heritage, and council/community representatives.The findings establish the usefulness of the validated framework in balancing the diverse interests of all stakeholders in the adaptive reuse decision-making process. Hence, this paper provides a significant contribution to the development of a methodology that integrates adaptive reuse stakeholders' diversified interests, for the selection of optimal case study building alternatives. The consensus of the multidisciplinary stakeholder group was found to be consistent and insensitive to reasonable changes in weighting. Also, the validated framework enabled the decision-makers to achieve a logical result, and support the visualisation of the impact of different priority aspects and criteria on adaptive reuse interventions in New Zealand.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to: identify the current and future challenges faced by university facilities managers; analyse their associated risk levels; and establish practical ways to address the identified key challenges. Design/methodology/approach -Personal interviews were conducted with 25 members of the Australasian university facilities managers (UFMs). The constructs generated at the pilot interviews were used to design a structured but open-ended questionnaire with which the Tertiary Education Facilities Managers Association (TEFMA) members were surveyed. The multi-attribute method was used in the data analysis. Findings -Results showed that the critical challenges currently facing the UFMs comprised issues relating to the following (in diminishing order of significance): inadequate funding, emergency management and business continuity planning, statutory compliance, sustainability and environmental stewardship, keeping up with rapid changes in technology, operational efficiency, identifying and meeting stakeholder needs, maintenance and manpower. Preparing for and responding to disaster/emergency was perceived as the most critical challenge of the future, perhaps, due to the recent natural disasters. Overall, poor funding was identified as the root of all other issues faced by the UFMs, hence suggested strategies for addressing the key challenges harped on financial improvement measures. Other key measures included optimized asset utilization, supporting business case for capital investment with demonstrable returns on investment, improving FM's strategic relevance through linking FM and corporate strategies, and investment in efficient technologies such as the building automation and management systems. Originality/value -The findings have contributed to filling an important knowledge gap by not only identifying the current and future challenges facing the UFMs, but also prioritising them based on their relative influences on the achievement of the strategic goals of the FM department. This way, the limited resources at the disposal of the UFMs could be disbursed more cost-effectively in addressing the critical challenges in line with their identified risk levels. This would be of practical benefit to the facilities and property managers in formulating appropriate responses to the identified critical constraints with a view to achieving more satisfactory outcomes in their operations.

Fire is a major hazard in built environments. Fires in buildings cause fatalities, serious injuries and tremendous damage. Most fires can be extinguished in the early stages of the fire's development, with the right equipment and correct use of the equipment. However, as there can be as little as a few minutes between a fire starting and very dire consequences, rapid and correct responses are critical. Implementing effective training solutions is necessary to enable members of the public, who are not experts in fire safety, to use a fire extinguisher correctly. This can assist to build resilience to fires. In recent decades, virtual reality (VR) has aroused the fire safety community's attention, as a smart, safe and effective training method compared to the traditional methods of lectures, non-interactive videos, and brochures. VR has been used for training for fire emergency preparedness and to collect data about evacuee decision-making, but VR has rarely been applied to a fully immersive training experience about fire extinguishers operation steps. Fire extinguisher operation steps are Pull, Aim, Squeeze and Sweep. Each step is critical to quickly extinguish a fire. This paper compares fire extinguisher training using a VR simulation with a non-interactive training video and evaluates the trainees learning of a fire extinguisher's basic operation steps, in terms of knowledge acquisition, retention of information and change of self-efficacy. The results showed that the VR trainees scored better than video trainees, in terms of knowledge acquisition, even if the same trend was observed for long term retention of information. It was also observed that VR training provided a higher increment of self-efficacy right after the training. The VR group participants had maintained the same level of self-efficacy even 3-4 weeks after the training, while the video group had shown a significant drop of self-efficacy.

This paper identifies the parameters for a performance-based framework to prioritise underutilised historical buildings for adaptive reuse interventions, while discussing its effectiveness towards promoting sustainable and resilient urban areas in New Zealand.A narrative review of extant literature is done to justify the need for the performance-based framework and build a list of relevant parameters that elucidates all or part of a typical decision-making process regarding the selection of historical buildings for adaptive reuse in New Zealand.Five main priority aspects with significant evaluation criteria that have been identified from this study are economic sustainability, built-heritage preservation, socio-cultural aspects, building usability, and regulatory aspects. This paper's originality pertains to the development of parameters for a performance-based framework that offers a basis for relevant adaptive reuse stakeholders to prioritise underutilised historical buildings while balancing their diverse objectives. Accordingly, the performance-based framework has been validated to justify the relevance of its applicability to the different outlined parameters, towards prioritising underutilised historical buildings for adaptive reuse in New Zealand.