Collaborative Research: Climate Impacts on the Urban Built Environment

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This project is targeted to fill a gap in the understanding of how to interpret and address climate change-related stresses on building performance. The project will provide insights about how climate change-related impacts on the urban built environment will influence regional energy supply, and what types of design and operation strategies are needed to adapt to or mitigate these impacts. The intention is to provide guidance for the development of standards addressing new building design, and also to facilitate development of improved adaptation and mitigation strategies in the existing building stock, while taking life cycle environmental impacts into account.The project will create an analytical framework for predicting urban building energy consumption considering different energy source types and associated greenhouse gas emissions under different climate scenarios. The framework will include building performance vulnerabilities resulting from variations and uncertainties in parameters that have the most impact on building energy use, and by extension, life cycle environmental impacts. The approach for the project is the development of a climate change-driven probabilistic framework for building energy consumption with a lifecycle assessment model under future scenarios. The specific objectives of the project are to: (i) predict the impact of possible adaptation and mitigation factors as well as future lifecycle impacts; (ii) quantify the uncertainties within a probabilistic framework of key climate risks and vulnerabilities and discretize them to the total uncertainty; and (iii) develop an urban scale energy and life cycle assessment framework to determine future environmental impacts with a focus on greenhouse gas emissions. In order to achieve these objectives, the project will develop a probabilistic model of how buildings will be affected by future climate, including uncertainties from both climate models and building performance. The project plan includes developing energy sourcing scenarios to estimate the future environmental impacts associated with the buildings’ energy consumption. Fourteen different adaptation and mitigation strategies will be studied to examine their effectiveness as the climate changes. The model will be developed, tested, and calibrated using the City of Philadelphia as a case study, working with the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability (OOS) in order to help them set appropriate and achievable targets for their Greenworks Campaign, the City’s comprehensive sustainability plan. The project is intended to help OOS create a roadmap for climate-prepared buildings, to improve overall efficiency and reduce maintenance costs for its building stock.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.