How Will New Zealand’s Buildings Cope with the Changing Climate?

Future climate change is projected to alter the heating or cooling demands across New Zealand, depending on their climate zones and what climate shifts these places will experience, the study “Evaluation of climate change effects on residential building cooling and heating demands in New Zealand: implications for energy efficiency standards and building codes” says.

Climate change studies show that Auckland, New Zealand’s most populated city on the North Island, will see rising temperatures in the future, driving the city’s cooling demands to increase more than its heating demands.

In other areas in New Zealand, particularly in the South Island with a colder climate, rising temperatures due to climate change will see residential housing’s thermal loads for the heating decline during winter and thermal loads for cooling increase in the summer season.

Rising temperatures due to climate change will see some cities shift from a heating-dominated climate to a cooling-dominated one.

There is a significant gap when it comes to an understanding of how climate change will affect the thermal and operational energy performance of housing in New Zealand. And are there risks and benefits from climate change regarding a building’s thermal performance?

A paper by Zahra Jalali, Asaad Y. Shamseldin, and Sandeeka Mannakkara from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, examines climate change impacts on the energy performance of residential buildings in New Zealand and the requirements for heating and cooling for its standard residential building in the context of future climate conditions.

The study focuses on three of New Zealand’s biggest cities – Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Previous New Zealand studies find that the number of days with temperatures exceeding 25°C will increase significantly in 2050 and more so in 2080. The increasingly hot days will lead to more demand for air conditioning and overheating load in New Zealand.

The paper used a downscaling method to generate weather data for the three locations in New Zealand with varying climate zones.

According to the authors, this projection highlights the importance of taking a holistic and long-term approach to addressing the impact of climate change on New Zealand building thermal performance, and the results of the study can inform the appropriate building codes for the design of residential buildings suitable for the future climate.

Read the paper by clicking the link in the “Source” section below.