The impact of climate change on the performance of residential buildings from an occupant-centric perspective - A systematic review

Europe faces the challenge of providing affordable and high-quality housing for growing populations, while reducing its buildings’ energy consumption and phasing out fossil fuels. However, in the context of climate change, progressively warmer summers and increasingly frequent heatwave events not only intensify the risks of overheating, but they also impact building energy consumption and indoor environmental quality. To better understand these impacts, there is a need for the development of reliable methods to predict future weather scenarios and building performance that appropriately accounts for occupants. This systematic literature review aims to investigate methodologies and metrics for assessing performance of dwellings under future climate conditions, including health and wellbeing of building occupants. The PRISMA 2020 approach was applied to identify the current literature of case studies of dwellings’ performance under future weather scenarios. The Mendeley Reference Manager and the ASReview Lab were used to assist screening the papers, while the selected case studies were chosen based on relevance and quality criteria. The results of this review indicate that methods based on building simulation tools can be used to project building performance in response to Climate Change. While the current literature has been focusing on buildings’ thermal and energy performance, indoor air quality (IAQ) is still a topic not much explored. Additionally, despite the complexity and uncertainty on occupant’s behaviour, the application of uncertainty/sensitivity analysis associated with the use of computational tools can provide promising results for occupant-centric building performance in changing climate.