Adaptive Thermal Comfort

To remain comfortable in a world of ever more extreme weather events and climate trends we need a building revolution. Buildings designers, owners, managers and occupants must prepare now for future climates with new ways to stay comfortable indoors. This book is a compendium of information on comfort that provides an overview of the complexity of the many ways that comfort is achieved in buildings. It outlines the impacts and implications of current design practices on greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and the health and well-being of people in them. In reality many modern buildings and particularly homes are already failing in various ways. During extreme weather events they overheat. During power outages many buildings do not even remain habitable. During the COVID pandemic cross-infections between occupants were rife in buildings like hospitals and hotels without opening windows. As energy prices soared, and globally economies flat-lined many found themselves unable to pay for high cost comfort solutions and so either had to change their lifestyles and expectations or learn to live with discomfort. Underlying many of the growing global problems is the trend towards an overdependence on mechanical systems to produce comfort, coupled with a decrease in the passive climatic performance of the buildings themselves. Both factors are resulting in a generation of increasingly un-resilient buildings.

The theory of Adaptive Thermal Comfort states that people adapt to those temperatures they normally occupy, and if they become uncomfortable they tend to change themselves, or their surroundings to return to comfort if they are able or can afford to. This is the third of three volumes that builds on the practical and theoretical foundations of the subject laid out in the first two volumes. Its builds on their premises to shape a new and better roadmap going forwards for imagining, designing and constructing the adaptable buildings and behavioural lifestyle changes needed to prepare humanity to survive and thrive comfortably in the very different weather and climates ahead.