Building Energy Modelling for Historical Buildings: Current Distribution of Literature Case Studies in View of Climate Change

Abstract

Building Energy Modelling (BEM) applied to historical buildings is rising as a non-invasive and useful means to improve their energy and environmental performance by supporting informed choice of appropriate solutions for sensitive renovation. Being climate data one of the main inputs of simulations and considering the life span of historical buildings, it is increasingly important to support BEM reasoning with future climate conditions for the design of effective and climate-change-proofed adaptation strategies. A systematic literature search was carried out through the Scopus database and identified 67 journal articles published between 1997 and 2022 on the use of BEM for the energy efficiency of historical buildings. To investigate the extent to which climate change will likely affect the outdoor forcing conditions in the reviewed case studies, their locations were paired with the climate classes according to the Köppen-Geiger classification maps provided by Beck et al. (2018) for the recent past and far future. The results were then discussed in light of the climate classification of the architectural sites in UNESCO's World Heritage List (WHL) for the same reference time periods. According to the literature review, it emerged a substantial representation in current research of case studies in temperate (i.e., Cfa and Csa) and cold (i.e., Dfb) climate classes together with a scarcity of case studies involving arid climate classes (i.e., BSh, Bsk, and BWh), although the latter ones are expected to house almost 30% of the WHL architectural sites in the future.