Climate change and thermal comfort in colombian social housing

Abstract

Climate change is globally one of the most relevant problems of the 21st century and despite strategies that seek to minimize its consequences, it is an irreversible reality. Therefore, it is pertinent to analyze its impact on Colombian architecture, specifically on Social Housing (SH), the type of building most frequently built in the country. The purpose of this research was to get to know the thermal performance of current SH, in relation to climate change, based on a standard model for the most populated cities in Colombia, namely Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. This model was made using computer simulations in three future scenarios (2030/2050/2080), which allowed diagnosing how climate change will affect the thermal comfort of the occupants. The results show that, of the total number of scenarios evaluated (576), only 18.9% are in an acceptable range of time in thermal comfort (>70%). This indicates that most of the SH currently built in Colombia do not provide thermal comfort conditions either under a climate change scenario or in the current scenario, since in both situations the favorable cases represent a low percentage with respect to the total number of cases evaluated.