Abstract
The body of literature on climate change impacts on building energy consumption is rising, driven by the urgency to implement adaptation measures. Nevertheless, the multitude of prediction methodologies, future scenarios, as well as climate zones investigated, results in a wide range of expected changes. For these reasons, the present review aims to map climate change impacts on building energy consumption from a quantitative perspective and to identify potential relationships between energy variation and a series of variables that could affect them, including heating and cooling degree-days (HDDs and CDDs), reference period, future time slices and IPCC emission scenarios, by means of statistical techniques. In addition, an overview of the main characteristics of the studies related to locations investigated, building types and methodological approaches are given. To sum up, global warming leads to: (i) decrease in heating consumptions; (ii) increase in cooling consumption; (iii) growth in total consumptions, with notable differences between climate zones. No strong correlation between the parameters was found, although a moderate linear correlation was identified between heating variation and HDDs, and total variation and HDDs. The great variability of the collected data demonstrates the importance of increasing specific impact studies, required to identify appropriate adaptation strategies.
Highlights
A review of the state of the art concerning the impact of climate change on building energy consumption was performed, addressing the problem from a quantitative point of view
Based on a set of inclusion criteria related to the problem statement, a sample of research papers was selected, and their main characteristics were extracted and summarised in a matrix, collecting data on the parameters perceived to be relevant
From a geographical point of view, the spread of the studies does not appear to be homogeneous across the planet, but rather a preponderance of investigations was identified in Europe, far-east Asia, and the eastern United States, with a special emphasis on climate zone C (65% of studies)
Summary
Allows generating future weather data where historical data are not available [35]. The relationships between different weather variables are accounted for in the same way as for baseline data [36]. Different methodological approaches have been already overviewed in previous studies [23,41], along with the main impacts of global warming on energy consumption [19,42,43], to the best of our knowledge, quantitative evaluations based on the results of existing studies in terms of energy consumption variation due to climate change have not been ever presented For these reasons, the present work aims at mapping climate change impacts on building energy consumption from a quantitative point of view, with an attempt to identify potential relationships between energy changes and a series of input methodological variables which could affect them. This paper is organized as follows: the first section reports the review methodology, the second section gives a comprehensive overview of the main features of the selected studies, the third section presents the results of meta-analysis, the fourth section presents the management implication of the results, the fifth section presents the research limitations and future prospect, and in the sixth section the main conclusions are summarized
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