Facing Climate Change in a Temperate European City: Urban-Scale Diagnosis of Indoor Overheating and Adaptation Strategies for Residential Buildings

Abstract

The rise in outdoor temperatures and heatwaves highlights the limitations of buildings in adapting to warming conditions, even in temperate climates. This paper analyses the indoor overheating of residential dwellings in Pamplona (a city in northern Spain, with a Cfb climate) using an urban-scale diagnostic methodology and presents different envelopes’ retrofitting scenarios as a strategy to reduce it. The results come from energy simulations conducted during an extremely warm summer in 2022, considering the microclimate effects. The residential typologies most vulnerable to overheating are those with only one orientation, built before the EPBD 2002, and located on top floors. These dwellings show a 23.7% mean of indoor overheating hours (IOH), representing approximately 870 h above the EN 16798-1:2019 adaptive threshold from May to September. Renovating building envelopes to meet current energy standards reduces the IOH by an average of 8.6% and up to 15.35% in the most vulnerable typologies. In the retrofitting scenario with green roof systems, indoor temperatures are up to 0.5 °C lower than when roofs are renovated with traditional systems. This study assists policy-makers in preventing the risk of overheating within cities and encourages them to promote nature-based solutions in order to adapt urban residential buildings and cities to warming conditions.