Climate Change and Hygrothermal Performance of Building Envelopes: A Review on Risk Assessment

Climate change, marked by unpredictable patterns and extreme events, is expected to persist, posing challenges over the service live of buildings. Consequently, building practitioners must incorporate future climate considerations in both the design of new constructions and in the retrofitting of existing structures. Building practitioners assess risk by characterizing the consequences of climate conditions and using tools to aid implementation. However, understanding the relationships between climate and building component responses is complex. Several studies worldwide have attempted to characterize the impact of climate conditions on building components, such as those of deterioration models and response indices. Despite these efforts, integrating research results into risk-based decision support that considers climate scenarios and building design remains limited, partly due to uncertainties, interdependencies, and benchmarking challenges. Therefore, this research highlights the significance of hygrothermal analysis and the advancements in assessment methods for climate effects on hygrothermal performance of building envelopes. An approach based on System Dynamics is proposed to create a structured and integrative tool capable of explicitly capturing factors affecting building system performance under climate change.