International. Danfoss published a report exploring the path to resilient buildings. The report, which was developed in conjunction with the Department of Architectural Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, explores the challenge of resilience and its intersection with energy efficiency, in the context of an overall demand for sustainability.
According to the report, the forms of the resilience challenge are potentially diverse, including climate change, disease pandemics, economic fluctuations and terrorism. And communities, specifically urban areas that are expected to host nearly 70 percent of Earth's population by 2050, were not designed to handle the impacts.
Traditionally, the built environment was designed to be fail-safe. But, the report states that, as catastrophic events become more intense and more frequent, protection against failures is no longer possible; infrastructure, instead, must be designed to be safe from failure, redefining the infrastructure strategy to integrate elements of sustainability and a new conception of high-performance buildings.
Well-designed buildings and effective controls can help maintain building temperatures indefinitely, or for a very important period, despite prolonged blackouts, and digitalization linked to heating and cooling will be critical to optimizing energy consumption in buildings.
Scott Foster, director of the sustainable energy division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, wrote in the report's preface: "Resilience has become an integral part of the quality of life in the built environment and is therefore an important element in the overall sustainable energy equation. It will be impossible to meet our global carbon targets or the goals of the 2030 Agenda without successfully addressing the challenge of resilience, which is essentially a dimension of the global sustainability crisis that now defines the international action agenda."
Prioritizing and addressing the complex challenge of resilience will require the involvement of a variety of stakeholders, including local and national governments, who must adopt policies to develop long-term climate and energy plans.
Dr. Sez Atamturktur, Dr. James Freihaut and Dr. Gregory Pavlak of Penn State University's Department of Architectural Engineering contributed to the report.
Source: Danfoss.
