Mitigation Strategies

Future climate change might have a tremendous impact on energy use, ventilative cooling strategies and thermal comfort in buildings, since these parameters are strongly correlated with the external weather conditions.
This paper will present results of a study of the impact future climate change scenarios as developed by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) and implemented in weather files for specific future time slices (2020, 2050 and 2080) on the design of the external envelope of a hotel building in Greece. Three climatic regions of Greece are considered.

Urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon has been observed in many populated cities located in cold regions (e.g., Montreal in Canada) during summer. One of the well-known strategies to mitigate the temperature rise of urban areas is increasing their albedo. Roofs cover about 25% of urban areas and increasing their reflectivity would have significant effect on the total energy budget of a city. Changing the surface energy budget can directly affect the air temperature near ground and the vertical wind speed.