The impact of a warming climate has serious implications for older people in care facilities as they are most vulnerable to negative health effects of excessive heat. This paper uses a building simulation approach to examine the current and future risk of summertime overheating and potential adaptive response of four care and extra-care settings representing different construction, technical design and built ages across the UK. Insights from semi-structured interviews with design teams of case studies reveal their awareness and attitudes towards future-proofing design of care settings against climate change and overheating. Modelling results demonstrate the magnitude of projected summertime overheating in care and extra-care schemes, yet there appears to be little awareness amongst designers about the risk of overheating and implementation of long-term adaptation approaches such as external shading, provision of cross-ventilation. Although age, location, and orientation are found to have notable effect on the magnitude of overheating, they are difficult aspects to change in existing buildings, yet they provide insights into adaptive responses with regard to retrofit, management and use of care settings. Designers also need to focus on long term planning of care settings rather than near future, to anticipate the effects of climate change on care settings.
Gupta, RajatGregg, Matt
Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment\School of Architecture
Year of publication: 2017Date of RADAR deposit: 2017-05-04