A review of assessment methods for the urban environment and its energy sustainability to guarantee climate adaptation of future cities

Abstract

Reviewed assessment methods for the urban environment • Critically analysed papers working on urban climate and energy demand, outdoor thermal comfort and the urban energy systems. • Demonstrated the links between the processes • An integrated workflow is proposed for assessment of the urban environment. AbstractThe current climate change is calling for a drastic reduction of energy demand as well as of greenhouse gases. Besides this, cities also need to adapt to face the challenges related to climate change. Cities, with their complex urban texture and fabric, can be represented as a diverse ecosystem that does not have a clear and defined boundary. Multiple software tools that have been developed, in recent years, for assessment of urban climate, building energy demand, the outdoor thermal comfort and the energy systems. In this review, we, however, noted that these tools often address only one or two of these urban planning aspects. There is nonetheless an intricate link between them. For instance, the outdoor comfort assessment has shown that there is a strong link between biometeorology and architecture and urban climate. Additionally, to address the challenges of the energy transition, there will be a convergence of the energy needs in the future with an energy nexus regrouping the energy demand of urban areas. It is also highlighted that the uncertainty related to future climatic data makes urban adaptation and mitigation strategies complex to implement and to design given the lack of a comprehensive framework. We thus conclude by suggesting the need for a holistic interface to take into account this multi-dimensional problem. With the help of such a platform, a positive loop in urban design can be initiated leading to the development of low carbon cities and/or with the use of blue and green infrastructure to have a positive impact on the mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) tools: A state-of-the-art review of bottom-up physics-based approaches

“…In the future, the available computational power will rise, and, by consequence, a complete integration between different tools, exploiting the GUI of the UBEM tool, could be carried out. Especially, the heat exchange among buildings and between the buildings and the surroundings could largely improve the simulation of the building energy use itself but also the analysis regarding heat island effect and outdoor comfort conditions, both within major trend research topics [26,156]. Finally, two major trends of development for UBEM tools can be defined from the present analysis.…”

A Review of the Relation between Household Indoor Temperature and Health Outcomes

“…The scarcity of energy efficiency studies comparatively to the topic of indoor temperature and human health should be seen under the light of the exclusion criteria undertaken and justifies the pertinence of this study. This is not an uncommon problem, for example, Mauree et al faced also a similar issue of shortage of studies when reviewing the future implications of climate change on urban design and thermal comfort [18]. Although relevant from an energy and thermal comfort perspective, a more detailed approach to studies that monitor indoor temperature and energy consumption, but disregard its health implications, goes beyond the scope of this review, since the association to a health outcome would be lacking.…”

“…These driving forces may adversely influence relevant biomarkers for cardiovascular conditions among for elderly, such as raised blood pressure. However, the relevance of other influencing factors, such as the built environment, has been increasingly recognised in terms of physiological responses to temperature [17][18][19][20].…”

Optimization of building form and its fenestration in response to microclimate conditions of an urban area

“…Moreover, these weather file cannot represent extreme weather conditions which can have a large impact on the peak loads. However, it is not feasible to design the overall form of a building based on microscale recorded or simulated data for each site due to expensive and time-consuming process [14]. Thus, an approach should be defined to couple microclimate simulation with E3S Web of Conferences 1 72, 19002 (2020) NSB 2020 http://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202017219002 design/optimization process of buildings at early stages of design.…”