Major European Stressors and Potential of Available Tools for Assessment of Urban and Buildings Resilience

Abstract

Recent data show that there are intensifications of phenomena related to climate change, such as the increasing of heavy rains, more frequent and intense droughts connected with fires, and alterations of the local climatic conditions, including heat islands with consequent impacts on cities, districts, and buildings. Not only are natural hazards stressing Europe but also human-induced events like low-magnitude earthquakes as a direct cause of fracking or mining. This study aimed to investigate the significant stressors and summarize what impact is the most dangerous in each European country. There is a need to secure the operating conditions of urban infrastructures and to preserve a high-quality indoor environment of buildings. The main scope of this paper is to compare selected tools that evaluate the urban and building resilience and to assess their suitability, based on an analysis of natural and human-induced hazards in the European countries. The results represent a contribution to urban and architectural planning practice, and to the consistent implementation of measures to improve the resilience of the built environment by providing guidance as to which assessment tool is most suitable for each country.

Building thermal resilience framework (BTRF): A novel framework to address the challenge of extreme thermal events, arising from climate change

“…The thermal performance of any building is related to several external and internal factors. External factors, such as climate, power supply, expected downtime, location, and orientation, can radically change the level of required thermal loads, and increase direct solar heat gain, exposing a building to the heat island effect (mailto Attia et al, 2021), (Felicioni et al, 2020). Other external factors such as occupancy schedule, types of clothing, cold beverage consumption, and thermal experience, can be attributed to the perception and culture of the occupants, significantly changing both thermal comfort and thermal demand (mailto Attia et al, 2021), (Schünemann et al, 2021), (Aljawabra and Nikolopoulou, 2018).…”

“…However, throughout the literature, we can observe several approaches to improve the performance resilience of a building and subsequently its resilience, whether it is passive, active, or related to the building's surroundings (Zhang et al, 2021), (De Wit, 1997;Zhivov, 2021;Schünemann et al, 2022). Some approaches focus on the building design, starting from the building's site characteristics, as a building's location and orientation can increase its thermal load (Azarnejhad and Mahdavi, 2019;Felicioni et al, 2020;Schünemann et al, 2022). For example, a study indicates that the heat island effect can create a temperature difference as high as 11 °C during a heatwave (Hong et al, 2021).…”

Flood Resilience and Adaptation in the Built Environment: How Far along Are We?

“…In this sense, buildings facing the OS constitute a s interference element because they mainly alter floodwater runoff in relation to frastructures (e.g., sewers) [39,40]. Consequently, they both influence buildin due to floodwaters [41][42][43], as well as the immediate emergency response, incl evacuation process, in light of the availability of gathering areas and paths [44,4 Hence, it is pivotal to outline the interaction systems in OSs according to a m approach that relies on the modeling of "each individual receptor at risk" [46]. R In Figure 2, it is possible to observe three clusters, which show thematic grouping around different topics.…”

“…Urban resilience is the capacity of an urban system to respond to shocks by preventing, adapting, or responding to them. When considering urban resilience, the built environment plays a fundamental role [1][2][3][4]. The term "built environment" (BE), which became common in 1990, refers to the result of human activities, and the research about this complex topic includes the fields of architecture, engineering, construction engineering, landscape, and urban planning [5].…”

“…More than half of the global population lives in cities [6], and to make them resilient is necessary to tackle the different sources of vulnerability deriving from climate change, earthquakes, epidemics, etc. However, in this study, we focus primarily on floods, as flood risk is increasing dramatically due to growing urbanization and climate change, especially in developing countries, where the impact is even greater [4,7,8].…”