Co-benefits of Cooling Cities: Improving Outdoor Thermal Comfort and Building Energy Efficiency

Climate change amplifies urban heat island effects, bringing severe outdoor heat stress and surging building cooling demand across global cities. Urban cooling interventions, ranging from nature-based solutions and urban morphology to passive mitigation strategies, reshape urban microclimate and simultaneously modify building cooling loads. While abundant literature separately investigates outdoor thermal comfort or building energy performance, the joint co-benefits and trade-offs between them remain insufficiently synthesized. Understanding these coupled or synergistic effects is critical for built environment design that bridges outdoor space quality and indoor/energy performance.Current urban cooling practices often optimize either outdoor thermal comfort or building energy-saving performance in isolation, potentially overlooking conflicting outcomes or untapped synergies of integrated strategies. For instance, certain cooling measures may improve outdoor comfort yet deliver limited energy reduction for adjacent buildings, or vice versa. Recent advances in urban microclimate simulation, on-site monitoring, and high-resolution urban building energy modeling enable quantitative assessment of such dual outcomes. This Research Topic aims to bring together original research, critical reviews, and case studies gathering empirical, numerical, and theoretical evidence to unpack co-benefits and trade-offs of city cooling measures. It intends to identify evidence-based planning and design solutions that maximize both outdoor thermal comfort for citizens and building energy efficiency. Ultimately, it supports climate-responsive built environment decision-making for heat-resilient cities, bridging urban climatology, building physics, and architectural practice.- Microclimate/building energy impacts of green infrastructure, cool roofs/pavements, and blue spaces- Co-benefits/trade-offs between outdoor thermal comfort and building cooling loads- Multi-scale simulation and field measurement methods of urban microclimate/urban building energy- Frameworks, case studies, and practices for climate-adaptive urban/architectural design- Advanced climate adaptation strategies for extreme meteorological events- Data-driven energy management in buildings at multi-scale levelsWe welcome diverse article types, including original research, methods, perspectives, opinions, hypotheses, theories, and full reviews. The Research Topic is interdisciplinary, inviting contributions from architecture, urban planning, building science, environmental monitoring, data analytics, and human-centered design. Topic editors: Sheng Liu, Xiao Liu, Kuixing Liu, YIHAN WU Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86016/co-benefits-of-cooling-cities-improving-outdoor-thermal-comfort-and-building-energy-efficiency