Ronald Albers and Peter Bosch (TNO, The Netherlands)
Bert Blocken (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Prof.dr.ir. Bert Blocken
Motivation for a new special issue of Building and Environment on climate adaptation in cities
In September 2012 Building and Environment published a very successful Special Issue on “Implications of a Changing Climate for Buildings”, edited by Pieter de Wilde and David Coley (Volume 55). Following this effort, a new Special Issue on climate change and cities is launched for the following reasons:
1) Attention for adaptation to the impacts of climate change is rising worldwide. Especially cities are getting organised to put climate adaptation on the political agenda. The demand for information on the impacts of climate change on cities, buildings and urban infrastructure and the effectiveness of adaptation options is growing.
2) Research on climate change impacts and adaptation in the built environment has taken off in the past few years. Whereas in first instance attention went mostly to the vulnerability of cities, more and more research nowadays focuses on adaptive solutions. Especially in the field of the (cost)effectiveness of adaptation measures rapid progress is being made.
3) In the overview article in the September 2012 Building and Environment Special Issue, specific knowledge gaps were identified, including:
- the need to conduct more climate change impact studies, to cover (a) a wider range of building types, configurations and systems and (b) further climate scenarios for additional locations;
- the role of building maintenance, renovation and repair in ensuring building performance in the long term;
- further work on understanding and managing the Urban Heat Island effect;
- the potential as well as implications of occupant behaviour;
- the concepts of flexible, robust and resilient building design, integrating concepts for a long lifetime with concepts that allow for adaptation;
- systems that are used within buildings, like HVAC systems, lighting and ICT equipment;
- development of approaches to rank various mitigation and adaptation strategies.
This new special issue is intended to address a considerable share of the research needs as expressed in 2012.
4) Building and Environment is an excellent forum for presenting research combining insights in the urban climate outside and building performance focused on the building envelope and inside environment of buildings. Many of the adaptation options indeed affect both the climate outside and inside buildings.
5) In the September 2012 Special Issue, most of the articles focused on buildings. This new Special Issue provides an opportunity to widen the scope and to demonstrate the interrelations between adaptation in the wide range of exterior spatial scales (metropolitan, city, neighbourhood, street) and adaptation in and on buildings.
Scope of Special Issue
Despite all international, national and local initiatives to mitigate climate change, a certain degree of climate change is unavoidable. Urban environments in particular are vulnerable to the consequences of climate change: increased risk of flooding, droughts and heat waves. How can cities as dynamic systems, where most people live and work, prepare for such changes in climate?
Research needs to strengthen the adaptive capacity and reduce the vulnerability of the urban system against climate change and to develop strategies and policy instruments for adapting our cities and buildings. Articles submitted to the Special Issue should address one or more of the following questions:
1) How and to which extent do cities influence the local climate themselves?
2) How vulnerable are cities to climate change and what will be the impacts of future climate change?
3) Which measures and strategies are available and effective to improve the adaptive capacity of cities?
4) How to implement adaptive measures in urban areas?
Topics of particular interest therefore are:
1) Modelling of the urban climate with mesoscale meteorological models (MMM), microscale meteorological models (Computational Fluid Dynamics - CFD) and Building Energy Simulation (BES), and coupling of MMM, CFD and BES;
2) The sensitivity for and the various impacts of climate change on cities, including generally applicable vulnerability typologies for buildings and cities;
3) Application of MMM, CFD and BES to evaluate the effectiveness of adaptation measures;
4) The integration of adaptation measures in complex urban development processes.
As cities are a focal point for all kinds of societal and urban design issues, successful implementation of climate adaptation policies will require integration with other policy and spatial planning issues in the urban area. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration between many scientific disciplines: engineers, designers, natural scientists, physical planners and political scientists. Paper addressing this integration/collaboration are especially welcome.
The Special Issue welcomes papers reporting basic research as well as case studies, and papers based on numerical simulations as well as papers based on experiments. Papers on numerical simulations should include error analysis and validation by comparison with experiments. Papers on experiments should contain an error analysis.
Submissions are welcome starting from September 1st, 2013. The submissions will be handled through the Elsevier Editorial System (EES), where a special dropdown menu “Climate Adaption” will be available.
The submission guidelines are identical to those of regular papers to be submitted to Building and Environment. Authors should clearly indicate why their paper is a unique and novel contribution to the Special Issue and how it fits into the scope of the Special Issue. This should also be made clear in the abstract and introduction of the paper.
Questions can be sent by email to:
Prof.dr.ir. Bert Blocken
- 15 December 2013: final deadline for submissions to EES.
- 15 February 2014: final deadline to have results of first review round sent to authors of all submitted papers.
- 15 April 2014: final deadline for submission of all papers.
- 15 May 2014: final deadline to have results of second review round sent to authors of all submitted papers.
- 15 June 2014: final deadline for submission of final versions of all papers.
IMPORTANT: Once accepted, the papers will be published following the new Elsevier paging system. This implies that a volume number will be assigned to the Special Issue and that as soon as a paper is accepted, page numbers will be assigned and the paper will be published. As a result, publication times are kept as short as possible and that publication of all papers in the Special Issue does not need to be postponed until the publication of the last paper in this Issue.