Investigating the productivity of office workers to quantify the effectiveness of climate change adaptation measures

Abstract

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.

A holistic review of research on carbon emissions of green building construction industry

“…The following targets are the office buildings. In total, 16 articles choose the typical office buildings from around the world to conduct experimental research, including office building in central London (Azzouz et al, 2017), Finland (Aaltonen et al, 2013), Colombia (Castro-Lacouture et al, 2009, the UK and India (Steemers and Manchanda, 2010), certified green office buildings in Taiwan (Liang et al, 2014) and Malaysia (Yau and Hasbi, 2015;Zaid et al, 2017), council office building (Kershaw and Lash, 2013) and companies' headquarter (Wang et al, 2014). There are some studies focus on the education buildings, for example, solar energy research center in the campus of University of Almer (Rosiek and Batlles, 2013), kindergarten in Amman (Hammad et al, 2014), LEED-certified university building (Kucukvar et al, 2016), etc.…”

Effects of thermal sensation and acclimatization on cognitive performance of adult female students in Saudi Arabia using multivariable‐multilevel statistical modeling

“…These tasks include memory, reasoning, and planning; however, attention functions differ from these functions in that they underlie and maintain the activity of the cognitive functions which can justify the discrepancy in the results obtained of the effects of thermal sensations on the vigilance tasks versus the memory tasks (Table 3 ). Also, this can also be linked to arousal where Kershaw and Lash 17 explained that attempting to maintain high arousal levels in unfavorable thermal environments can lead to fatigue and diminishing performance. Watanuki and Kim 18 revealed that exposure to moderate cold resulting in reduced comfort is believed to have the potential to activate the amygdala and can result in higher arousal, also Maula et al 19 found that task‐specific effort was significantly higher at a slightly warm temperature for a long‐term memory task which can justify the negative effects observed on accuracy attributed to the hot and warm sensations.…”

Analysis of Current Automation Level in Specific Compressed Air System with Model for Optimization

“…Having in mind that numerous studies [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] shown that indoor climate have a significant impact on people's health [27], their productivity [23,24], cognitive functions and wellbeing [25], a suitable indicator for determining air quality is the concentration of CO2. Normally, the concentration of CO2 in the air increases by breathing.…”