Mitigating climate change through healthy discomfort

Abstract

Amid the climate change and the worldwide catastrophes, witnessed on a daily, we find ourselves in a time in which we need to start justifying any recourse and energy consumption, at least of which is not truly renewable. While the outside temperatures become more extreme, the inside environment becomes more relevant. The way we design and operate our buildings is directly influenced by current building standards and as we spend almost all our time indoors, our comfort, wellbeing and health are crucially affected by such. The last five decades have seen many approaches in establishing guidelines for a comfortable indoor environment. But while current standards favor the narrow temperature ranges of static homogeneous environments, they have been criticized for their high energy consumption and long-term health implications. The paper compares a typical office space with mechanical cooling with that of a passive strategy, by evaluating the energy consumption and health over comfort. The results show a 64% cooling potential within the mechanically cooled scenario as well as the passive strategy complying to standard without any cooling energy.