Effects of Climate Change for Thermal Comfort and Energy Performance of Residential Buildings in a Sub-Saharan African Climate

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of the impacts of climate change on thermal comfort and energy performance of residential buildings in Ghana, in sub-Saharan Africa, and explores mitigation as well as adaptation strategies to improve buildings’ performance under climate change conditions. The performances of the buildings are analyzed for both recent and projected future climates for the Greater Accra and Ashanti regions of Ghana, using the IDA-ICE dynamic simulation software, with climate data from the Meteonorm global climate database. The results suggest that climate change will significantly influence energy performance and indoor comfort conditions of buildings in Ghana. However, effective building design strategies could significantly improve buildings’ energy and indoor climate performances under both current and future climate conditions. The simulations show that the cooling energy demand of the analyzed building in the Greater Accra region is 113.9 kWh/m2 for the recent climate, and this increases by 31% and 50% for the projected climates for 2030 and 2050, respectively. For the analyzed building in the Ashanti region, the cooling energy demand is 104.4 kWh/m2 for the recent climate, and this increases by 6% and 15% for the 2030 and 2050 climates, respectively. Furthermore, indoor climate and comfort deteriorate under the climate change conditions, in contrast to the recent conditions.

Evaluating the wind cooling potential on outdoor thermal comfort in selected Iranian climate types

“…Therefore, for our study, we improved the output of the GCMs spatiotemporally using the Meteonorm software, observation values, and remote sensing data to address the uncertainties. Hence, to improve the data quality spatially and temporally, the interpolation methods and the Markov chain random approach were used, respectively (Meteotest, 2009;Remund et al, 2010;Robert and Kummert, 2012;Bellia et al, 2015;Herrera et al, 2017;Dodoo and Ayarkwa, 2019;Nematchoua et al, 2019;Osman and Sevinc, 2019;Bienvenido-Huertas et al, 2020;Roshan, 2020). Accordingly, R 2 , normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), and bias (BIAS) were used to evaluate and validate the GCM.…”

Dwelling Characteristics Influence Indoor Temperature and May Pose Health Threats in LMICs

“…We could have overcome this by installing commercially available weather stations in each of the towns and preferably more than one in each town to monitor differences in temperature, wind speed, and direction, and so on. Future studies should aim for larger sample sizes and include detailed information on the orientation of the house in relation to North/South since this can influence indoor temperature, among other variables such as roof colour, presence of awnings and outdoor shade nearby the dwelling [45]. While observations were made by fieldworkers regarding whether there appeared to be a problem in a dwelling -ventilation, presence of mould, etc.…”

Identification of Obstacles to Implementing Sustainability in the Civil Construction Industry Using Bow-Tie Tool

“…Sustainability in civil construction has been the subject of studies in the most diverse areas [2,7,9,[24][25][26][27] ranging from selecting materials which have less impact on the environment, reducing the consumption of energy and the use of water, to reducing costs, etc., throughout the chain. It seeks to ensure that actions are taken to reduce environmental impacts, enhance economic process viability and provide a good quality of life for current and future generations, before, during and after construction phase.…”