[Publications] Impacts of climate change on the indoor environment of buildings in Belgium

On the 15th of November 2022, the OCCuPANt project consortium met in Arlon. The project investigates the influence of climate change on the thermal comfort, air quality, and energy performance of the Belgian residential building stock.

The project attendees and members are Anne-Claude Romain, Mohsen Pourkiaei, Essam Elnagar, Vincent Lemort, Xavier Fettweis, Sébastien Doutreloup, Ramin Rahif, Shady Attia.

The project site includes several useful publications and datasets in the open-access format: https://lnkd.in/gQdW-z5y

This project is looking to provide climate change scenarios for Wallonia, in line with the IPCC scenarios that will be used in the next assessment report AR6 in 2021 and; that will be downscaled at 5km with the existing regional climate model MAR, developed by the Climatology Lab in ULiège for Belgium (Wyard et al., 2017). This model was notably successfully used to reconstruct the flood occurrences in Ardennes over 1960-2010, to perform some first future projections over Belgium in the framework of the BRAIN CORDEX.be project, and is used every day to perform ten days of weather forecasts over Belgium at a resolution of 5 km (which are available on http://climato.be:prevision). The central research questions in this project are:

• What are the likely impacts of climate change on the sensitivity and vulnerability of the indoor environment and energy performance of existing and newly constructed buildings in Wallonia?

• When, where, and to what extent will buildings adaptation measures be needed?

These research questions can be broken down into work package-specific research questions:

• What plausible climate scenarios can provide realistic pictures of the future climate in Wallonia?

• How can a typological classification of buildings be established for the residential sector?

• What potential impacts on human well-being and comfort during overheating and high air pollution episodes?

• What potential impacts on heating, ventilation, and cooling energy demand and electrical energy production in Wallonia?

• What will be the socio-economic consequences of climate change and air-conditioning on the building stock, and what will be the effect of building adaptation (rebound effect) measures?

The overarching aim is to guide the policy of local, provincial, and regional governments in, among others, spatial planning, energy security, and public health. Many stakeholders, such as local governments, urban designers and planners, health services, housing corporations, building engineers, architects, and energy companies, can be identified. Specific stakeholders that will be engaged in this project and other parties include (Liege, Charleroi, Namur, Antwerp, Ghent, and Brussels).

Special thanks to Mohsen and Anne Claude for the outstanding organization.

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