Design for Climate Change

3Designing for Thermal Comfort: Comfort & Overheating

As we noted in Chapter 1, our built environment and our lifestyles have evolved together in response to a specific climate. Now that climate is changing, we face the challenge of rapidly revising our accepted approach to building design to reflect a new and developing set of conditions.

All the Design for Future Climate project teams paid significant attention to thermal comfort, illustrating that of all the projected consequences of climate change, hotter summers are seen to be the most pressing issue for designers and are likely to have the most demonstrable impact on the way we design our buildings.

Until recently, the principal focus of environmental design and regulation in the UK has ...