Resilient cooling of buildings to protect against heat waves and power outages: Key concepts and definition

The concept of climate resilience has gained extensive international attention during the last few years and is now seen as the future target for building cooling design. However, before being fully implemented in building design, the concept requires a clear and consistent definition and a commonly agreed framework of key concepts.

The most critical issues that should be given special attention before developing a new definition for resilient cooling of buildings are (1) the disruptions or the associated climatic shocks to protect against, (2) the scale of the built domain, (3) the timeline of resilience, (4) the events of disruption, (5) the stages of resilience, (6) the indoor climate limits and critical comfort conditions, and (7) the influencing factors of resilient cooling of buildings.

This paper focuses on a scoping review of the most of the existing resilience definitions and the various approaches, found in 90 documents, towards possible resilient buildings. In conclusion, the paper suggests a definition and a set of criteria —vulnerability, resistance, robustness, and recoverability— that can help to develop intrinsic performance-driven indicators and functions of passive and active cooling solutions in buildings against two disruptors of indoor thermal environmental quality—heat waves and power outages.