This project will develop sound methods for future climate change data for building designers to use for new buildings and refurbishments, most of which will last to the end of this century. The outputs will primarily be: academic papers and a draft for a Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, CIBSE, Technical Memorandum, suitable for practising designers; case studies to validate the new weather data design methodology and assess the potential adaptation of new and refurbished buildings to reduce carbon emissions. This TM will also be useful for CIBSE to use to determine a consistent future weather design methodology and future data for its new Design Guide, which is the fundamental document used by Building Services Engineers for designing buildings and their services. It is a supporting document for the Government's Building Regulations. The basis for this CIBSE data will be the new UK Climate Impacts Programme, UKCIP, future scenarios due in 2008, UKCIP08, with probabilities of various future weather outcomes for this century.To ensure that the new, probabilistic outputs will be useful to professionals, and to reflect best practice in design, there will be strong stakeholder involvement through the formation of a Stakeholders Group, via CIBSE, (Weather Task Force and collaborating consultancies), the Manchester-led EPSRC SCORCHIO project, (looking at urban heat island and climate change vulnerability, with contacts to UKCIP and the Tyndall Centre), architects and software houses. Policy makers will be reached via the Stakeholder Group Corresponding Members linked to the Department for Communities and Local Government and their contractors, including BRE. Risk levels will be assessed and data provided to enable designers to use the data with confidence. This bottom-up approach will serve to inform policy makers of what can be achieved practically. In addition there will be numerous case studies for validating the new methodology andTo provide this consistency, a novel method will be developed which will allow UKCIP08 scenarios and probabilistic weather data to be the basis of design which takes into account coincident weather parameters, e.g. solar radiation, air temperature, wind speed and direction. It is known that solar and air temperature have profound and sometimes differing influences on the comfort and carbon emissions of the building and that design values in the Guide are not necessarily coincident. Thus the hottest summer (or summer day) may well not be the sunniest summer (or day). New building design indices will be developed, with the aid of the current building designs contributed by members of the Stakeholder Group and collaborators. Solar radiation data, not covered in detail in the HadRM3 and UKCIP02 models, will be developed to satisfy designers' requirements. Likewise wind data, although the confidence level will be lower. It will be crucial to include wind data since wind drives natural ventilation. Rainfall duration and quantity are also important in the building design process because of drainage and rain penetration damage and designers' requirements will again be reviewed.Urban heat island effects, (where the urban areas are often hotter than the nearby rural areas), briefly mentioned in the present Guide, will be developed from the EPSRC SCORCHIO work to provide more realistic urban weather data. Local modification or downscaling will also be applied to generate data for other sites in the UK. This will enable the new Guide to cover more than the current 14 sites for which data were developed by Manchester for CIBSE

It is well known that climate change will have a significant impact on UK building design and energy use. It is also known within the building science and architectural communities that the current weather files used for thermal modeling of buildings only represent average weather rather than heat waves or cold snaps. As was shown by the 14,000 deaths in Paris during the 2003 heat wave, this is a highly serious issue and there is the need to ensure future buildings are designed to deal with future weather, or extremes of current weather. In addition, the current weather files used by the construction industry and building scientists divide the UK into only 14 regions, with, for example, the whole of the South West peninsular (including up-land areas) being assigned the coastal Plymouth weather file. It is known that this can easily lead to a 200% error in the estimation of annual energy demand. The scale of this error is such that it renders many of the dynamic simulations carried out by engineers questionable. This is unfortunate when simulation is used within the framework of the building regulations, but it is fatal when trying to use simulation to estimate how resilient a pre-existing building is, or the danger its vulnerable occupants might be in. The aim of this project will be to see if a method can be devised that is capable of creating local weather from 2015 to 2080 covering the whole UK at a resolution of 5km, and to include within this files that represent various excursions from the mean: e.g. heat waves and cold snaps. An interdisciplinary approach is envisaged with the project separated into six work packages: WP1 We will use a method already published by the team together with the UKCP09 weather generator to produce current and future typical weather at a resolution of approximately 5km. WP2 The work in the previous work package will initially require the creation of thousands of years of weather per site. Within these initial years will reside a large number of weather events of interest to the building scientist or engineer. These files will be used in computer models of 1200 differing architectures and building uses to identify what are the key drivers of weather variable coincidence that defines the likelihood of building system failure or thermal issues for occupants. WP3 Having characterised which events best describe the stresses on a building, its occupants and systems in WP2. Event years (i.e. times series of weather data variables on a one hour time step that represent atypical hot, dry, cold and wet periods) will be created for the whole UK. WP4 Having generated the event years, and simulations from the 1200 buildings, the two will be recombined to produce the first map of UK resilience to a changing climate. Although others have looked at the regional resilience of the built environment using average weather years, the concern is not about the response of building and occupants to such average time series, but to more extreme events. WP5 Given the large number of files proposed, guidance will need to be given on which to use in practice, and how this might be expressed in the building regulations and other documentation. We plan to use case studies as the main guidance tool. This will add greatly to their intellectual validity within the target audience of practicing engineers. In total, we expect the guidance to be tested on >100 real building projects. WP6 Impact. All weather files produced by the project will be publicly available for a minimum of 10 years. A series of road shows will be undertaken at the end of the project. At these events the results of the project will be presented to a large number of users. The idea will be to introduce the whole UK built environment community to the idea of designing resilient buildings aided by the weather data produced by the project. A short film will also be produced for those that cannot attend and for an international audience.

Meeting pressing carbon emission reduction targets successfully will require a major shift in the performance of buildings. The complexity of the building stock, the importance of buildings in people's lives, and the wide spectrum of agents responsible all make buildings an important area of 'policy resistance'. Policies may fail to achieve their intended objective, or even worsen desired outcomes, because of limitations in our understanding of the building stock as a dynamically complex system. This limitation can lead to 'unintended consequences' across a range of outcomes. The concept of the 'performance gap' with regards to the energy performance of buildings is now well established and useful work to begin to understand this challenging issue has been undertaken. However, potential unintended consequences related to the inter-linked issues of energy/Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) present an even greater and more complex challenge - a challenge that is gaining increasing importance in the UK and China. There are exciting opportunities to address this issue of 'total performance' in order to reduce the energy demand and carbon emissions of buildings whilst safeguarding productivity and health. Our work will begin by examining the contrasting context within which buildings have been designed and constructed and within which they are used and operated internationally. We will address the policies and regulatory regimes that relate to energy/IEQ but also the assessment techniques used and the ways that buildings are utilised. We will then build on this analysis by undertaking an initial monitoring campaign in both countries to allow comparisons between the performance of the same types of building in the two different contexts. We will evaluate how energy/IEQ performance varies between building type and country. This work will enable the assembly of a unique database relating to the interlinked performance gaps. This initial monitoring work will also allow us to identify the most suitable buildings for the next stage of the work that will integrate monitoring and modelling approaches. This phase of the work will develop semi-automated building assessment methods, technologies and tools to enable rapid characterisation of probable pathologies to determine the most cost-effective route to remedy the underlying root causes of energy/IEQ underperformance. Energy/IEQ issues do not form a closed system however. In the development of relevant policies and regulations, it is vital to consider the wider system and we propose a second stream of work to address this. The team at UCL has undertaken pilot work within the housing sector as part of the EPSRC funded Platform Grant ('The unintended consequences of decarbonising the built environment'). We successfully employed a participatory system dynamics approach with a team of over 50 stakeholders and we will extend that work here to other building typologies. Such an approach can help support decision-making in complex systems, addressing challenges central to the TOP work. The proposed work is tremendously challenging and exciting. If successful it will lead the way in understanding and improving the total performance of low carbon buildings and help to develop relevant effective policies and regulations in the transition towards future Low Carbon Cities. Tsinghua and UCL have the suitable complementary world-leading expertise to undertake this work and form a long-term 'best with best' academic collaboration. The Bartlett at UCL is rated first in terms of research 'power' and environment in the UK; the Tsinghua University School of Architecture was ranked first in China in the National Assessment on Architecture in 2003, 2008, and 2011. The groups in both countries have extensive stakeholder networks and the outputs of the project will thus be communicated widely and appropriately.

This project will develop sound methods for future climate change data for building designers to use for new buildings and refurbishments that could last to the end of this century. The principal application output will be a draft Technical Memorandum (TM) for the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, CIBSE, suitable for practising designers. This will be supported by extensive case studies to validate the new weather data design methodology and be used in research tasks described later. 'Story lines' relevant to different scenarios for the climate and built environment will be developed as well as risk levels in building design to enable designers to use the weather data with confidence. The TM will provide CIBSE with a consistent methodology for the selection and use of future data for its new Design Guide, a fundamental document used by designers of buildings and their services and a supporting document for the Government's Building Regulations. The basis for this project will be the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) future scenarios to be published in 2008 (UKCIP08) from which may be derived probabilities of different weather outcomes over this century. Academic outputs will include an extensive assessment of the carbon reduction potential of active and passive systems and designs for new and refurbished buildings. They will utilise case studies with PC simulation of the building and systems, employing the new probabilistic weather data. These assessments will provide designers and policy makers with guidelines to help reduce the growth in greenhouse gases (GHGs) from buildings, which at present contribute about 50% of the UK emissions. Other academic outputs will provide the theoretical basis underlying the proposed consistent PC-based and manual design methodology with coincident, probabilistic future weather data parameters such as solar radiation, air temperature, wind speed and direction. It is known that solar radiation and air temperature have peak values at different times and on different days but current design methods do necessarily separate them so that over-design often occurs. A related academic output will be a theory underpinning the selection of the proposed new Design Reference Year (DRY) which will facilitate building design (including passive and active heating and cooling systems and comfort assessment) with simulation on a PC. The DRY will replace the currently unsatisfactory Design Summer Year. Solar radiation data, not covered in detail in the HadRM3 and UKCIP02 models, will be developed to satisfy designers' requirements. Likewise wind data (crucial to include since wind drives natural ventilation) although the confidence level will be lower. Rainfall duration and quantity are also important in the building design process because of drainage and rain penetration damage and designers' requirements will again be reviewed.'Urban heat island' effects (urban areas are often hotter than the nearby rural areas), briefly mentioned in the present Guide, will be incorporated in the new data, developing on SCORCHIO work to provide more realistic urban weather data. Local modification or downscaling will also be applied to generate data for other sites in the UK. This will enable the new Guide to cover more than the current 14 sites for which data were developed by Manchester for CIBSE.To ensure that the new, probabilistic outputs will be useful to professionals, and to reflect best practice in design, there will be strong stakeholder involvement through the formation of a Stakeholders Group, including Corresponding Members, which will include CIBSE, architects and software houses and housebuilders. Policy interests will be reached via the Department for Communities and Local Government, and DEFRA and their contractors, such as BRE. There will be links to the Manchester-led EPSRC SCORCHIO urban heat island and climate change project, UKCIP and the Tyndall Centre.

This Green Transition Ecosystem focuses on citizen attitudes and behaviours through speculative design engagement, focused design initiatives, prototyping of new products and interrogation of circular economies. This work will be grounded in the analysis and application of seven key policies for the Northern Ireland (NI) region, including the Energy Strategy - Path to Net Zero Action Plan(DfE, 2022), Waste Management Plan(DAERA, 2019), Deposit Return Scheme(DAERA, 2023), the related consultation for Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging(DAERA, 2022), Rathlin Island Policy and Action Plan (DfI, 2016),10X Economy - NI's Decade of Innovation(DfE, 2021) and The Circular Economy Strategy (CES) for NI (DfE, 2023). Our place-based themes of rural regions, land/water edge conditions and offshore islands, are delivered through three project-based Work Packages which use co-design, demonstrators and circular economy modelling. These overlap and are intersected by two strategy-based Work Packages informing education and policies for change. Details of the Work Packages are as follows: WP1, Product Waste Ecosystems; WP2, Green Digital Transition; WP3, Organic Waste Ecosystems; WP4, Design Sustainable Futures Education; and WP5, Green Policies. Given its contained scale and its geographically peripheral situation in relation to the UK and Europe, Northern Ireland is particularly suited to the creation of system-shifting changes, to meet our institutional and regional sustainability commitments. The role of design is to harness the potential of small countries to positively transform waste culture and behaviour, organisational change, and innovation generation through an accelerated journey of just community empowerment, applied design and worldbuilding. By extending and deepening our existing interdisciplinary research, this 'enculturing transition design' programme works through a range of community-based concerns (e.g. local waste management) alongside regional place-based challenges (e.g. coastal pollution and the negative impacts of tourism). WP1: Product Waste Ecosystems interrogate waste plastics as a commodity within a 3D print ecosystem, serving repair and product innovation cultures (WP1.1), potentially reducing carbon emissions from plastics production or incineration. Waste electronic and electrical equipment are reimagined into diverse new value propositions (WP1.2) extending product lifecycles and reusing manufactured parts in new ways. WP2: Green Digital Transition addresses the negative impacts of tourism. NI's flourishing Screen Industry will transcend sustainable and responsible tourism through digital design and technology. Content focuses on the Rathlin offshore island visiting experiences and the preservation of biodiversity through worldbuilding (WP2.1) alongside sustainable immersive digital heritage and culture (WP2.2). WP3: Organic Waste Ecosystems propose climate transition pathways and build design ecosystem networks in NI through existing, tested co-design and civic engagement methods. Working with interdisciplinary researchers through collaborative multi-disciplinary design, nature-based solutions are fostered leading to nested circular economies. WP4: Designing Sustainable Futures Education develops commitments for sustainable futures within educational institutions (primary to higher education), professional CPD, public sector and public engagement organisations. Design is deployed to build a visual language and knowledge base for future sustainable lifestyles. WP5: Green Policies analyse, understand and position the findings for NI within the above contexts, to frame, synthesise, and co-evaluate visions for preferable futures. These simultaneously recognise contemporary constraints and plans for a future world that will differ from the present. It works in tandem with the design practice activities towards policy implementation and real change in the region.