Energy Efficiency and Life Quality in Indoor Environment

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce a new Special Issue, “Energy Efficiency and Life Quality in Indoor Environment”, of the journal Sustainability.

Most people spend a majority of their lives indoors, and their quality of life is significantly affected by indoor environments. However, it is estimated that building sectors are responsible for more than 30% of global energy consumption and roughly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to ensure that indoor environments remain safe, comfortable, healthy, and productive. This contrarily impacts the outdoor environment and may degrade human and wildlife environment, lifestyles, and quality of life in the long run. How to minimize energy consumption and, at the same time, to maintain, if not to improve, people’s quality of life and to establish a sustainable and resilient society, is a great challenge, especially in some special scenarios, such as extreme weather conditions, prolonged and more frequent heat waves, wildfire smoke, isolating a COVID-infected patient in a home, or managing the air quality and the isolation of wards in a large hospital during a highly infectious disease outbreak. With reference to the challenge and the breadth of the fields about sustainability, quality of life, and indoor built environment, this Special Issue invites original research articles and reviews that aim to address specific aspects of the interactions among the three fields for achieving integrated solutions for better quality of life in sustainable buildings with higher energy efficiency and lower environmental impacts. Research topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Human interaction with indoor environments;
• Correlations between health, life quality and indoor environments;
• Impact of climate change on human housing and lifestyles;
• Energy consumption for improving indoor environment quality;
• Sustainable building management;
• Interaction between indoor and outdoor environments;
• Applications and integrations of energy efficient technologies for high-performance buildings;
• Smart home technologies and applications;
• Retrofits of existing buildings for energy saving and their effect on indoor air quality;
• Building weatherization;
• Energy efficiency and building design solutions;
• Building ventilation strategies and management during a pandemic;
• Future homes and low impact living;
• Renewable energy applications for heating, cooling, and/or cooking.

Dr. Yigang Sun
Guest Editor

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.

• sustainability
• energy efficiency
• indoor environment quality
• comfort, health, and wellbeing
• life quality
• building performance
• sustainable homes
• smart buildings
• innovative building technology
• energy impact
• heating and cooling
• ventilation
• energy-efficient retrofitting
• weatherization
• resilient construction and retrofit
• decarbonizing buildings
• ecological building