Abstract

As our planet warms, the world faces increasingly severe and frequent heatwaves, challenging the comfort and safety of residential environments. While existing studies often focus on historical conditions and general future weather predictions, the impacts of extreme climate events on buildings remain underexplored. This leaves critical questions unanswered regarding the vulnerability of buildings and the well-being of occupants in the context of climate change. To address these challenges, our research analyzes both historical data and future weather scenarios to assess the resilience of the UK’s residential housing against extreme heat. In my talk, I will present the insights gained from our analysis, highlighting key factors that contribute to the vulnerability of homes to heatwaves and the expected severity of these conditions. The focus hereby lies on indoor thermal comfort and the direct consequences for occupants. We further introduce a novel metric for quantifying liveability in buildings based on ranges of possible activities. The results are made available through the Heatscore application, allowing users to assess the liveability within homes across the UK under different climate conditions. Finally, I will present the Heatalyzer, a novel Building Energy Modeling tool developed to make our methodology accessible to a wide audience. This tool allows users to evaluate and understand the impacts of extreme heat on indoor environments for various geographic locations.

Bio: Livia Capol is a Master’s student in Computer Science at ETH Zurich. She has been working on her thesis at the University of Cambridge since last September under the joint supervision of Keshav and Zoltan Nagy (The University of Austin at Texas).