Europe’s Heatwave Battle: How Age-Old Building Ways Beat the Heat

Abstract

As heat stress intensifies across Europe, the escalating use of air conditioning poses environmental, equity, and reliability concerns. Macro-quantitative performance analyses of passive cooling techniques (PCTs) are lacking, hindering the development of thermal resilience policies. Employing an extreme value bias approach, this study investigates the capacity of vernacular PCTs to satisfy thermal comfort and safety standards in current and projected European climates, demonstrating the substantial contribution they can make towards meeting cooling demand until the end of the century. Results show that such PCTs could still fulfill 90% of cooling demand for comfort in at least 83.30% of cooling-demanding regions across Europe over the 2070-2100 period (including 82.82% of Mediterranean regions), compared to 99.93% over the 2010-2040 period. While occasionally insufficient for comfort, PCTs could still play a crucial role in safeguarding occupants, meeting over 90% of the cooling demand for safety during extreme temperature and humidity events in at least 84.28% of cooling-demanding regions of Europe (including 75.05% of Mediterranean regions) over the 2070-2100 period (compared to 99.68% over the 2010-2040 period).