School Buildings Adaptation, Resilience and Impacts on Decarbonisation in a Changing Climate (ARID)
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Bartlett Sch of Env, Energy & Resources
Abstract
This project will provide tools and evidence to inform the Department for Education (DfE) policies and investment, by exploring the climate change risks and opportunities for new build and existing schools in the context of Net Zero Carbon Britain by 2050. This project also addresses the three key risks and opportunities identified in the Climate Change Risk Assessment 3 Report (CCRA3) for Health, Communities and the Built Environment (winter energy demand, summer energy demand and overheating). The overall DfE's Climate Change Risk strategy will build on this work and the risk assessment quantification and mapping methods already developed by the Risk Protection Arrangement (RPA) Team in DfE, the Environment Agency and the Government Actuaries Department to assess flooding, fire and crime risk in schools. The outcomes of this project will be disseminated via the DfE portal for Good Estate Management of Schools (GEMS) as well as the RPA websites. This project will be an essential part of the DfE climate resilience efforts under the Government National Adaptation Plan.
Publications
Godoy-Shimizu D
(2022)
Pathways to improving the school stock of England towards net zero
in Buildings and Cities
Godoy-Shimizu D
(2021)
Reducing emissions in London schools with photovoltaics
in Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Hong S
(2021)
Characterising the English school stock using a unified national on-site survey and energy database
in Building Services Engineering Research and Technology
Schwartz Y
(2022)
Modelling platform for schools (MPS): The development of an automated One-By-One framework for the generation of dynamic thermal simulation models of schools
in Energy and Buildings
Thoua C
(2021)
Handbook of Indoor Air Quality
| Description | Creation of school building stock digital twin using various digital databases. This resulted in a unified school database enabling us to provide Department for Education (DfE) information such as detailed benchmarks for different school categories and explore retrofit pathways for meeting emission reduction targets. |
| Exploitation Route | The key outcome of the project, Modelling Platform for Schools (MPS), provides a comprehensive framework to create digital twins from building stock information stored across different building departments. The framework developed and tested here for schools is replicable where rich data for other segments of the privately and public owned non-domestic building stock is available, in the UK and internationally. The methods and tools developed in the project to produce a stock model of UK schools can be envisaged as a pilot for a wider model of the non-domestic building stock. The lessons and learnings from the schools themselves are providing insights for schools to test climate resilience, adaptation and decarbonisation scenarios. |
| Sectors | Construction,Energy,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Description | The project has provided a step change in scale, scope and ambition of how to deal with large building stocks by: 1. adopting an integrated approach throughout the project, examining risks and solutions across scales: from individual schools, to regional and national levels 2. accelerating the policy impact of our research and overcoming barriers to provide a feasible and equitable solution pathway for the protection of school children in a changing climate whilst meeting pressing carbon emissions reduction targets. The examples use of the findings were in seen in DfE using new benchmarks created from the project database for specific school types. Also, the models were used to explore retrofit pathways for meeting the targets for emissions reduction for 2035 and 2050, feeding into DfE's spending reviews. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2021 |
| Sector | Construction,Energy,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Economic,Policy & public services |
| Description | Retrofit Parhways for Schools with Department for Education |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to a national consultation/review |
| Impact | Retrofits pathways are intended to meet the targets for emissions reduction for 2035 and 2050. |
| Title | Modelling Platform for Schools |
| Description | The UK Government has recently committed to achieve net zero carbon status by year 2050. Schools are responsible for around 2% of the UK's total energy consumption, and around 15% of the UK public sector's carbon emissions. A detailed analysis of the English school building stock's performance can help policymakers improve its energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. Building stock modelling is a technique commonly used to quantify current and future energy demand or indoor environmental quality performance of large numbers of buildings at the neighbourhood, city, regional or national level. 'Building-by-building' stock modelling is a modelling technique whereby individual buildings within the stock are modelled and simulated, and performance results are aggregated and analysed at stock level This paper presents the development of the Modelling Platform for Schools (MPS) - an automated generation of one-by-one thermal models of schools in England through the analysis and integration of a range of data (geometry, size, number of buildings within a school premises etc.) from multiple databases and tools (Edubase/Get Information About Schools, Property Data Survey Programme, Ordanance Survey and others). |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The study presents an initial assessment and evaluation of the modelling procedure of the proposed platform. The model evaluation has shown that out of 15,245 schools for which sufficient data were available, nearly 50% can be modelled in an automated manner having a high level of confidence of similarity with the actual buildings. Visual comparison between automatically-generated models and actual buildings has shown that around 70% of the models were, indeed, geometrically accurate. MPS could potentially be used for: • Analysing policy makers and other stake holders (school communities, local authorities etc.) on the efficacy of a wide range of retrofit measures applied to an individual school, such as improved insulation, replacing existing lighting with more efficient LED lighting, glazing replacement, or improved HVAC (heating, ventilating and air-conditioning) systems' control strategies. • Testing the potential for integrating renewable technologies on an individual school building level. • Assessing daylight availability and quality, by taking into account the surrounding context. This would enable the identification of schools, or zones within schools, which are likely to experience poor daylighting quality. • Estimating the overheating risk of individual schools. This is of particular interest in schools with no air-conditioning which, due to applied refurbishment measures or climate change, might be more predisposed to experience severe overheating. • Identifying schools, mainly in dense urban areas, which are under a risk of decreased Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). MPS can evaluate possible scenarios, such as reduced potential for passive cooling through natural ventilation due to higher ambient temperatures as a result of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, increased particulate pollution due to poor ventilation or external air pollution, and exposure to nitrogen oxides (NOx) from traffic due to proximity to major roads. |
| URL | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778821008501#s0090 |
| Title | MPS: Modelling Platform for Schools framework |
| Description | This is a framework for the automated generation and simulation of thermal models of the English school building stock, on a one-by-one basis. |
| Type Of Material | Computer model/algorithm |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | MPS - which has the capability to generate individual schools within the English school building stock - will enable analysis and evaluation of the future impact of a range of school-performance issues (e.g., assessing refurbishment packages, stock-resilience under changing climate, integration of renewables and more). |
| Title | Unified Schools Database |
| Description | We produced a unified schools database, using data from a number of large-scale, disaggregate sources. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | This was used to produce input data for modelling, as well as for assessing the schools stock performance. |
| Description | Data Sharing Agreement |
| Organisation | Department for Education |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | Data analytics, providing feedback on data collected by the Government |
| Collaborator Contribution | Providing the datasets and providing the context for our research |
| Impact | More sustainable school building stock |
| Start Year | 2020 |
| Title | DfE's Simple Decarbonisation Building Stock Model |
| Description | The model evaluates each school individually, allowing retrofit pathways for the stock to be defined and assessed at a disaggregate level (e.g. What is the impact of retrofitting school A in 2030 or 2040?). |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | This model, which includes detailed data on building form (footprints and heights) enables dynamic thermal simulation to be undertaken for each individual school block, allowing potential retrofit measures to be assessed with a consideration of issues such as temporal factors, changes to occupancy behaviour and climate change. It also enables a detailed breakdown of energy uses to be considered, allowing more nuanced retrofit options to be evaluated, including controls and ventilation system improvements. Evaluating the impact of improvements to ventilation systems, for example, is a key next step given that ventilation can account for a large portion of overall thermal losses and is of increasing importance in the context of Covid-19. |
| Description | Conference paper presentation at CISBAT 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Poster presentation for a paper titled "Reducing emissions in London schools with photovoltaics", submitted to CISBAT 2021 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Project Presentation at Education Estates conference 2021 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | A presentation titled Modelling Platform for Schools: Adaptation, Resilience and Impacts on Decarbonisation in a Changing Climate was given at the the Education Estates conference, form 12-13 October 2021 in Manchester, UK. This was a major presentation to lots of members of Dept for Education (DfE were an event partner) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| Description | Project Presentation to Civil Servants |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | up to 200 civil servants attended an internal Government meeting on climate change and decarbonisation, DEFRA has showed interest to joing the project advisory group |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |