Sustainable Energy and Climate: Net Zero Strategies and Rapid Decarbonisation Pathways

Dear Colleagues,

Achieving zero-carbon targets plays a vital role in reducing the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Societies, either developed or developing, cannot deal with the demands of consumer’s energy use—in the design and procurement of built environments. So, many European laws aim to reduce energy use and cut CO₂ emissions to 80% of those in 1990 levels by 2030, and the UK Climate Act aims to reduce CO₂ emissions to 30% by 2050. Globally, many government initiatives at different levels are urgently seeking effective solutions to the problems emanating from rising energy bills. Developing the energy and simulation framework plays an important role in buildings’ retrofitting to bridge the knowledge gap between education and practice and to improve awareness in energy conservation within the EU-27 members. This could be achieved by introducing effective control mechanisms into the residential sector. There is not any set of agenda or rules to identify baseline scenarios in energy use, nor to set an effective guidance, nor a roadmap in order to imply cost-effective net zero energy targets by considering global warming.

This Special Issue aims to advance sustainable energy efficiency schemes with a focus on the Net Zero Energy implementation in the design of future buildings, cities, and retrofitting of existing buildings. This call seeks to address climate change while assessing the overheating risk of buildings to optimise occupants’ thermal comfort through evidence-based energy policy design worldwide. This Special Issue will present the importance of a human-based approach, involving features such as occupants’ behaviours on energy use to fill a research gap in energy simulation studies. The main objective is to address the problems of designing while considering climate, which is relevant for all types of building design and master planning schemes globally, particularly the implications for decarbonisation strategies. We seek to publish representative pilot case study examples, methodologies, and innovative design approaches spanning a broad range of topics to promote generalisability of findings. Invited contrubutions are not limited to studies on climate-responsive design, but also consider net zero energy design, policy making decisions, and planning strategies. This Special Issue will be of great interest to scholars of energy policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy systems, and planning.

Dr. Bertug Ozarisoy
Prof. Dr. Issa Chaer
Prof. Dr. Haşim Altan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• climate change and mitigation
• passive solar design
• sustainable building design
• environmental monitoring, testing, and modelling
• outdoor thermal comfort
• thermal comfort and adaptation
• net zero energy buildings and communities
• climate modelling and forecasting
• environmental sustainability
• climate resilience and adaptation
• urban environment
• urban heat island effect
• sustainable development goals
• indoor air quality
• healthy building design
• modelling energy performance of buildings
• building energy performance assessment methods
• energy efficiency
• energy policy and economics
• energy
• energy policy
• built environment
• net zero energy
• retrofitting
• life-cycle cost assessment
• building occupancy survey
• in situ measurements
• decarbonisation strategies
• socio-technical systems approach
• climate change projections
• occupant behaviour
• benchmarking and standardisation
• renewable energy systems
• sustainable technologies
• multi-objective optimisation
• energy conservation