Emerging Topics in the Sustainable Built Environment: Climate Change Adaptation, Energy Poverty and Well-Being

Dear Colleagues,

A resilient built environment is considered essential for sustainable development. Researchers and designers have been constantly responding to the opportunities and limitations posed by climate, occupant needs, societal expectations, and construction technology. With each day, living environments are more associated with comfort, health, and high energy efficiency. On the other hand, the last century has exhibited an extremely rapid increase in CO₂ emissions and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. The latter brings challenges on how to adapt to ever-increasing temperatures to which the built environment is exposed. Global temperatures are exceeding their highest ever measured values, extreme weather events, and the built environment adapted to past, colder climates—all of these facts present a very high risk for overheating, a deteriorated living environment, and a threat to human health and energy security.

Therefore, a timely adaptation to climate change is essential to ensure a sustainable built environment and provide human indoor and outdoor comfort, achieving high energy efficiency and fighting energy poverty. This Special Issue focuses on the approaches, tools, methods, and materials that support sustainable and affordable climate change adaptation, energy poverty mitigation, and a comfortable and healthy built environment. In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Climate change adaptation in the built environment;
• Sustainability, vulnerability, and resilience of high-performance and low-income buildings;
• Energy security, affordable housing, and the related evolution of energy and climate adaptation policies;
• Climate change-related indoor and outdoor environmental quality;
• Outdoor comfort conditions in urban areas and urban heat island mitigation and adaptation;
• Strategies and methods for the design and development of resilient buildings and urban resilience;
• Data collection and data management approaches and technologies for investigating indoor and outdoor conditions;
• Occupant–building interaction and crowdsensing as tools for achieving higher climate adaptation;
• Case studies in the built environment on energy efficiency, energy poverty, climate adaptation, environmental quality, and environmental monitoring.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Luka Pajek
Dr. Ilaria Pigliautile
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.