Modeling and Simulation for Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Design. A Case Study in Northern Naples District

Keywords: climate vulnerability, digital modelling, Key Enabling Technologies

According to the IPCC, climate risks on a global scale will intensify with every tenth of a degree and therefore climate adaptation and mitigation must be at the core of the global response to climate change. 
According to European Green Deal on the transition to climate neutrality, strategies and actions on the built environment through sustainable building renovation become a priority for reducing climate vulnerability in the urban context. These actions require the development of knowledge processes and methodological workflows supported by ICT tools, able to define new operational environments and procedures for appropriate climate-resilient strategies.

The study reported in the paper aims to test a methodological workflow, based on digital simulation tools, for the evaluation of the effectiveness of climate mitigation and adaptation measures on the building-open space system.
The paper reports the results of the project experimentation on the application case of the PRIN 2017 Research "Tech-Start_key enabling TECHnologies and Smart environmenT in the Age of gReen economy Convergent innovations in the open space/building system for climaTe mitigation". The application case is the former Polifunzionale building in Piscinola district in northern Naples.

The methodological approach is based on the combination and integration of digital tools for assessing the effectiveness of design solutions for the mitigation and climate adaptation of indoor and outdoor spaces. The study focuses on the modelling and simulation of environmental performances before and after the building renovation. To this end, the following software was used: ENVI-met for 3D microclimatic and thermodynamic modelling, Dragonfly for district-scale modelling, Grasshopper for parametric modelling, and i-Tree software for ecosystem services provided by greening.
In the 3D modelling, some geometric simplifications were carried out for speeding up the simulation. The dimensional limits due to the ENVI-met open-source enforced a double simulation scale, referring first to the full area and then to detailed zones, producing synthetic and specific data.
The following indicators were selected to assess the performance of design solutions for the renovation of the Polifunzionale building: Predicted Mean Vote, Mean Radiant Temperature, Surface Temperature, Potential Air Temperature, and CO2 concentration (through ENVI-met). In addition, the benefits in terms of CO2 sequestration and air quality were quantified using i-Tree as well as the provision of certain ecosystem services.

Results showed that, due to the increase of design solutions such as greening and porous pavements, there is an average reduction of 3% in the Predicted Mean Vote value, 0.5 °C in the Potential Air Temperature, 1°C in the Surface Temperature and Mean Radiant Temperature and 0.4 ppm in the CO2 concentration. 

The results demonstrate that the methodological approach is effective in evaluating mitigation and adaptation actions to tackle climate change through the definition of a set of indicators for monitoring the physical, functional and environmental aspects of the climate-resilient design solutions. The open-source versions of digital tools and database packages in the modelling and simulation allow for effective replicability of the process.