Recent progress in building energy retrofit analysis under changing future climate: A review

Pengyuan Shen, Yu Li, Xiaoni Gao, Yiqian Zheng, Peiying Huang, Ang Lu, Wei Gu and Shuxing Chen

Applied Energy, 2025, vol. 383, issue C, No S0306261925001710

Abstract: Climate change presents challenges to building sector energy consumption and system performance. This review assesses how future climate change impacts building retrofit analysis and implementation by synthesizing recent research and providing comprehensive insights for adaptation and mitigation strategies. The effectiveness of retrofit measures shows regional variation, while passive strategies become less effective in some areas as climate conditions change in the future. This work also reviewed methodological advances that are crucial for the future climate adaptive retrofit analysis, including better coupling between climate models and building simulations, developing more reliable downscaling techniques for global climate models, easy-to-use simulation tools that has balanced performance on computational cost and accuracy, and more intuitive optimization and decision-making support methods. Challenges remain in translating global climate projections to building scale applications, especially in urban environments where microclimate effects cannot be ignored. Implementation barriers fall into technical, economic and policy domains, which require both immediate performance requirements and long-term climate resilience to be considered in an integrated framework. Future research priorities include developing integrated modeling approaches which considers global and local climate effects, developing retrofit optimization methods that can handle climate uncertainty, and developing robust policy frameworks to support future climate adaptive implementation of building retrofit.

Keywords: Building retrofit; Climate change; Building performance; Building simulation; Energy use; Optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.125441

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