• Energy Research

During the course of 2018, 70.8 million people globally were forcibly displaced due to natural disasters and conflicts—a staggering increase of 2.9 million people compared to the previous year’s figure. Displaced people cluster in refugee camps which have very often the scale of a medium-sized city. Post-disaster and post-conflict (PDPC) sheltering therefore represents a vitally important element for both the short- and long-term wellbeing of the displaced. However, the constrained environment which dominates PDPC sheltering often results in a lack of consideration of sustainability dimensions. Neglecting sustainability has severe practical consequences on both people and the environment, and in the long run it also incurs higher costs. It is therefore imperative to quickly transfer to PDPC sheltering where sustainability considerations are a key element of the design and decision-making processes. To facilitate such transition, this article reviews both ‘existing solutions’ and ‘novel designs’ for PDPC sheltering against the three pillars of sustainability. Both clusters are systematically categorized, and pros and cons of solutions and designs are identified. This provides an overview of the attempts made so far in different contexts, and it highlights what worked and what did not. This article represents a stepping-stone for future work in this area, to both facilitate and accelerate the transition to sustainable sheltering.

AbstractFacility quality is dependent on the performance of utility infrastructure and local weather conditions in addition to social context. Theoretically, improvements in facility quality such as energy performance should reduce marginal costs of consumption for occupiers so as to increase asset values. This research explores the relationship between expectations of building energy performance and the financial value of real estate. The United Kingdom was selected as a leading case, being a large economy that has enacted legislation committing the government to delivering ambitious emission reductions to mitigate climate change. Appropriate instruments are identified and applied to a diverse set of case study offices. A scalable method is employed for calculating value at risk from energy performance for buildings. This involves a novel approach to testing supporting system capacity through an exploratory analysis of 2050 end-states and demonstration on real world contemporary cases as a feasibility study. In doing so, the significance of systematic risks to building energy performance can be quantified. By comparing systematic excess returns for energy performance with rental value for a large sample a Capital Market Line for building energy management emerges, providing a means to shadow price the social impacts of climate change.

The most appropriate responses to the energy management of buildings from now until 2050 are investigated through a process of scenario planning. A qualitative, explorative approach was undertaken to develop four 2050 scenario end-states resulting from an axis of two critical uncertainties not closely correlated: the attitudes of society towards sustainability; and the availability of energy. These scenarios were applied to the property industry through expert workshops, from which trends and themes were identified. The findings are that the property industry should prepare for a transitional period with an uncertain outlook. Therefore, it would be prudent for this industry to focus on resilient performance under a diverse set of futures, and plausible shock events, rather than optimizing for today's conditions. This could be challenging in a sector that works on relatively long time scales. Aspects that should be incorporated into property industry strategy are suggested: responding to the potential effe...

Abstract This paper presents a review undertaken to understand the concept of ‘future-proofing’ the energy performance of buildings. The long lifecycles of the building stock, the impacts of climate change and the requirements for low carbon development underline the need for long-term thinking from the early design stages. ‘Future-proofing’ is an emerging research agenda with currently no widely accepted definition amongst scholars and building professionals. In this paper, it refers to design processes that accommodate explicitly full lifecycle perspectives and energy trends and drivers by at least 2050, when selecting energy efficient measures and low carbon technologies. A knowledge map is introduced, which explores the key axes (or attributes) for achieving a ‘future-proofed’ energy design; namely, coverage of sustainability issues, lifecycle thinking, and accommodating risks and uncertainties that affect the energy consumption. It is concluded that further research is needed so that established building energy assessment methods are refined to better incorporate future-proofing. The study follows an interdisciplinary approach and is targeted at design teams with aspirations to achieve resilient and flexible low-energy buildings over the long-term.

Project interventions are important vehicles for development globally. However, while there is often allocation of resources for new and innovative (pilot) projects—with varying levels of success—there is seemingly less focus on consolidating and/or scaling the positive impacts of successful larger interventions. Assuming an overarching development goal to have long lasting impact at scale, this approach seems somewhat contradictory. Scaling is often not integrated into project planning, design and implementation and rarely pursued genuinely in the ex-post. However, where demand for further development remains outstanding beyond project completion, opportunities may exist to build upon project platforms and extend benefits in a cost effective manner. This paper examines existing scaling typologies, before introducing “scaling-within” as a concept to promote greater continuity of development to a wider range of stakeholders. Scaling-within offers the opportunity to “in-fill” intervention principles and practices to both project and non-project communities within a broader strategic framework to address disparities and to promote sustainable development. The authors draw on research from case studies of large-scale integrated watershed rehabilitation projects and assess scaling-within against a contemporary scaling framework drawn from the literature. While the concept is tested with watersheds as the administrative unit, the authors anticipate applications for other project management units.

Building lifetime and stock turnover are both key determinants in modelling building energy and carbon. However in China, aside from anecdotal claims that urban residential buildings are generally short-lived, there are no recent official statistics, and empirical data are extremely limited. We present a system dynamics model where survival analysis is used to characterise the dynamic interplay between new construction, aging, and demolition of residential buildings in urban China. The uncertainties associated with building lifetime were represented using a Weibull distribution, whose shape and scale parameters were calibrated based on official statistics on floor area up to 2006. The calibrated Weibull lifetime distribution allowed us to estimate the dynamic stock turnover of Chinese urban residential buildings for 2007 to 2017. We find that the average lifetime of urban residential buildings was around 34 years, and the overall residential stock size reached 23.7 billion m2 in 2017. The resultant age-specific sub-stocks provide a baseline for the overall stock, which—along with the calibrated Weibull lifetime distribution—can be used in further modelling and for analysis of policies to reduce the whole-life embodied and operational energy and CO2 emissions in Chinese residential buildings.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used as an early-stage design-decision tool to support choices of structural system. However LCA modellers must first make numerous methodological decisions, and the resultant wide variations in approach are often inadequately described by the modellers.\ud \ud This paper identifies, and quantifies, the three major areas of methodological variation. These are: temporal differences in the stages considered; spatial differences in the material boundaries; and physical disparities in the data coefficients. The effects are then demonstrated through a case study of a student residential building in Cambridge. The cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure is compared with concrete frame, steel frame and load-bearing masonry, considering the influence that varying the temporal boundaries, the data coefficients, and the spatial boundaries has on the choice.\ud \ud While for this building CLT is confirmed as the lowest impact material, the paper demonstrates that varying the methodological choices can change the results by an alarming factor of 10 or even more. The findings confirm the need for the utmost clarity and transparency with all LCA calculations. Making wider industry or policy decisions based on LCA results should be undertaken with extreme caution.