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The occupants' presence, activities, and behaviour can significantly impact the building's performance and energy efficiency. Currently, heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) systems are often run based on assumed occupancy levels and fixed schedules, or manually set by occupants based on their comfort needs. However, the unpredictability and variability of occupancy patterns can lead to over/under the conditioning of space when using such approaches, affecting indoor air quality...

The occupants' presence, activities, and behaviour can significantly impact the building's performance and energy efficiency. Currently, heating, ventilation, and airconditioning (HVAC) systems are often run based on assumed occupancy levels and fixed schedules, or manually set by occupants based on their comfort needs. However, the unpredictability and variability of occupancy patterns can lead to over/under the conditioning of space when using such approaches, affecting indoor air quality...

Personal thermal comfort models are crucial for the future of human-in-the-loop HVAC control in energy-efficient buildings. Individual comfort models, compared to average population responses, can provide the personalization required for successful control. In this work, we frame the thermal preference prediction task as a multivariate, multi-class classification problem and use deep learning and time-series-based approach for thermal preference prediction. We combine l1 regularization with...

Abstract The assessment of Nigerian teachers' climate science literacy and training needs on climate change concepts (i.e., causes, impacts, and solutions) are absent. This study relates teachers' climate science literacy and their expressed training needs in other climate change concepts and places teachers in groups. Following a descriptive survey design, 410 teachers were randomly sampled from 8338 public secondary school teachers in Enugu State, southeastern Nigeria. A...

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of today's youth. Globally, young people are at the forefront of climate change activism. Their ability to engage, however, depends on the level of knowledge of climate change and concern about the topic. We sought to examine levels of knowledge and concerns about climate change among youth in South Africa, and their experiences of heat exposure. Ten questions on climate change knowledge, concerns and experiences were nested within a...

Climate change poses a major threat to the future of today's youth. Globally, young people are at the forefront of climate change activism. Their ability to engage, however, depends on the level of knowledge of climate change and concern about the topic. We sought to examine levels of knowledge and concerns about climate change among youth in South Africa, and their experiences of heat exposure. Ten questions on climate change knowledge, concerns and experiences were nested within a...

This study investigated children’s perceptions and adaptive behaviors related to indoor thermal conditions of classrooms in primary schools with no air-conditioning systems during both summer and winter in Dehradun City, Uttarakhand, India. Responses were collected from 5297 school children aged 6–13 years. During the measurement periods, 100% and 94% of the samples were obtained under conditions outside an 80% thermally acceptable comfort range in winter and summer, respectively. The...

Rising temperatures are causing distress across the world, and for those most vulnerable, it is a silent killer. Information about indoor air temperature in residential dwellings is of interest for a range of reasons, such as health, thermal comfort and coping practices. However, there have been only few studies that measure indoor heat exposure, and contrast these to outdoor temperatures in rural-urban areas, of which none are in South Asia. We aim to close this knowledge gap with our...

This study examines school and college teachers' perceptions about climate change, taking into account academic backgrounds and experiences with the impacts of climate change. The study included 95 teachers from three schools and colleges (two private and one public) in the city of Sylhet, Bangladesh. The results show that most teachers have heard about climate change and understand what it means. Most also perceive that temperatures in Bangladesh are rising or fluctuating and that rainfall...

Background It is believed that poor classroom acoustics leads to lower levels of student learning and exposes teachers vocal folds to greater physical wear and tear. Objective This study sought to compare the quality of life by World Health Organization (whoqol-bref) questionnaire of 61 teachers working at schools with different acoustic conditions. Methods This paper reports on a descriptive exploratory study aimed at ascertaining the following: (1) outdoor sound pressure levels in the...

Building Energy prediction has emerged as an active research area due to its potential in improving energy efficiency in building energy management systems. Essentially, building energy prediction belongs to the time series forecasting or regression problem, and data-driven methods have drawn more attention recently due to their powerful ability to model complex relationships without expert knowledge. Among those methods, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have proven to be one of the most...

The purpose of the article, which is a comparative study, is to explore climate change discourses in South African and Norwegian geography textbooks by addressing the following questions: What policy discourses of climate change can be identified in the textbooks? How is the climate change content of geography textbooks influenced by predominant discourses in society? The authors assert that problems and solutions to climate change in textbooks are influenced by dominant discourses of...

A large part of energy consumption in homes, offices and commercial spaces is related to Heating, Ventilation and Air-conditioning (HVAC) devices. The effective parameter on the consumption of HVAC systems is internal heat gains that arise from occupants, electric equipment and lighting. In order to reduce the energy consumption of these systems, internal heat gains should be predicted accurately. Since there are few investigations performed on the prediction of internal heat gains, in this...

Ten healthy young adults slept one by one in a specially designed and constructed sleep capsule located in a climate chamber at two temperatures (24 °C and 28 °C) and two ventilation rates that ensured that the resulting CO2 concentrations were 800 and 1700 ppm. Subjectively rated sleep quality was reduced at 28 °C and reduced ventilation, while sleep onset latency was longer under these conditions. Sleep efficiency was lower at 28 °C. Subjectively rated fatigue and sleepiness decreased...

Climate change in India is one of the most alarming problems faced by our community. Due to adverse and sudden changes in climate in past few years, mankind is at threat. Various impacts of climate change include extreme heat, changing rainfall patterns, droughts, groundwater, glacier melt, sea-level rise, and many more. Machine Learning can be used to analyze and predict the graph of change using previous data and thus design a model which in the future can furthermore be used to catalyze...

This research aimed to examine the thermal comfort performance of students in naturally ventilated secondary schools’ classrooms in Makassar. The analysis compared the thermal balance and the adaptive model. The study analyzed data gathered from surveys conducted at eight secondary schools and local weather stations. The data consists of the measured indoor thermal environment of 48 classrooms. The personal data, users’ perceptions, and adaptive behaviors of 1,594 students were recorded in...

In Zimbabwe, like many parts of the world, climate change has triggered the occurrence of conflicts, which exacerbates social, economic and political instabilities. In response to the global climate crisis, United Nations established Sustainable Development Goal 13 (SDG 13) in 2015, which advocates for taking action against climate change. The Zimbabwean government established its climate change policy in 2016, by drawing heavily on the thirteenth Sustainable Development Goal. Enshrined in...

There have been many efforts globally toward fighting climate change; including international agreements, conferences, research, policies, forums, etc. In addition to these efforts, climate change education has recently emerged as an essential capacity-building tool to curb the climate crisis. However, development practitioners from the Global South have cited limitations with climate change education due to the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies over indigenous knowledge (IK)...