The impacts of climate change pose many threats to our current way of life. However, the current mitigation agenda has not yet produced the carbon emission reductions needed implying that some level of adaptation will be required. For buildings this is likely to mean either drastic changes to architecture, occupant behaviour or the increased use of artificial cooling to maintain thermal comfort in the future. The capital cost of sustainable buildings is often perceived to be higher than for conventional buildings and there is little incentive to employ sustainable building adaptations over air-conditioning type solutions, making future reductions in carbon emissions unlikely. In this paper we investigate contributing factors to worker productivity in an attempt to justify the perceived cost of sustainable adaptations. Then as a proof of concept we estimate the potential savings that could be achieved by applying two simple adaptations to an office building to produce a more comfortable environment. It is hoped that this consideration of loss of productivity and its causes will aid not only in the choice of useful adaptation decisions, but also a consideration of payback periods will help persuade building commissioners of their value and overcome the perceptions about sustainable buildings.
Highlights• Thermal comfort for an office under future climates is estimated.• Estimated reduction of worker productivity due to climate change.• GVA data used to equate productivity to savings to incentivise building adaptation measures.
Rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems are increasingly being implemented in buildings. It is common in the UK for simple RWH tank sizing methods to be utilised, and these do not consider future climate change. This paper describes the development of a tool, which integrates elements of basic and detailed sizing approaches from the British Standard for RWH, with the latest probabilistic UK Climate Projections data. The method was initially applied to the design of a university building in Cornwall, UK. The methodology utilises 3,000 equi-probable rainfall patterns for tank sizing for each time period. Results indicate that, to ensure that it is ‘likely’ that the same non-potable demand could be met in 2080 as in the present, a tank 112% larger would be required. This increases to a 225% over-sizing for a ‘very likely’ probability of meeting the same level of non-potable demand. The same RWH system design was then assessed for three further UK locations with different rainfall characteristics. From these assessments, a simplified method was developed to enable practitioners to size RWH system tanks for current and future climates. The method provides a new approach to meet present and future non-potable demands, while preventing excessive over-sizing of tanks.
In this study parametric changes were made to the distribution of the reflectances of diffuse vertical surfaces in the wells of model square atria placed in an artificial sky. The effects of these changes on the vertical daylight levels at various heights for central positions were examined. Painting the atrium surfaces with alternating, equal width bands of white and black matt paint created the reflectance distribution variability. The widths of the bands were gradually reduced, although the 50:50 black to white ratio was kept constant. The different distributions of reflectances were found to have very little effect on vertical daylight factor and internally reflected component values low down in the atrium well. For some of the higher measurement locations large differences were observed between the different reflectance distributions. Generally, as the bands became narrower and more numerous the daylight levels converged towards values that would be predicted from standard formulae using the area-weighted reflectance of the atrium.
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