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The government of Aotearoa New Zealand has recognised the gravity of climate change by adopting a Climate Emergency declaration, passing the Zero Carbon Act (2019), and asking the Climate Change Commission to chart a pathway towards a carbon-zero future. The climate emergency necessitates transformation of the practices and visions of individuals and society towards a sustainable future. We argue that education must be recognised as a key enabler for this transformational process. In this...

The government of Aotearoa New Zealand has recognised the gravity of climate change by adopting a Climate Emergency declaration, passing the Zero Carbon Act (2019), and asking the Climate Change Commission to chart a pathway towards a carbon-zero future. The climate emergency necessitates transformation of the practices and visions of individuals and society towards a sustainable future. We argue that education must be recognised as a key enabler for this transformational process. In this...

This article deals with the possibilities the lighting retrofit and the life cycle cost analysis economic analysis in the process of increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. It contains basic information about lighting retrofit and the life cycle cost analysis and its implementation for cost estimation for a building lighting system. The accuracy of the life cycle cost analysis was verified on three lighting systems. The first system consisted of an old (original) lighting system that...

This essay examines the everyday inequalities, stigmas, and injustices that leave people with disabilities highly vulnerable to escalating climate change risks. It argues that including people with disabilities in disaster risk reduction processes is essential to shaping inclusive, effective policies and practices. Examples of several programs that have done so are discussed. Focusing on the strengths of people with disabilities as resilient change-makers and as the experts in their own...

Global climate change is one of the most significant threats to our generation, the fundamentals of the issue lie in the fact that the anthropogenic contribution of greenhouse gases is changing the global climate at a rapid rate causing immense warming trends and displaced cold weather. This study examined the awareness levels of college/university students on climate change and their willingness to mitigate the effects of climate change. 69 students from Lahore’s different public and...

Since the thermal condition of living spaces affects the occupants' productivity and their quality of life, it is important to design effective heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) control strategies for better energy efficiency and thermal comfort. An essential step in HVAC control and energy optimization is thermal comfort modeling. Recently, data-driven thermal comfort models have been preferred over the Fanger's Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model due to higher accuracy and ease...

Children spend a significant proportion of their time at school and in school buildings. A healthy learning environment that supports children should be thermally conducive for learning and working. Here, we aimed to study the relations between indoor classroom temperatures and learner absenteeism as a proxy for children’s health and well-being. This one-year prospective study that spanned two calendar years (from June 2017 to May 2018) entailed measurement of indoor classroom temperature...

Monitoring the thermal comfort of building occupants is crucial for ensuring sustainable and efficient energy consumption in residential buildings. Existing studies have addressed the monitoring of thermal comfort through questionnaires and activities involving occupants. However, few studies have considered disabled people in the monitoring of thermal comfort, despite the potential for impairments to present thermal requirements that are significantly different from those of an occupant...

Climate change has a negative effect on health and enrollment in activities, especially for education for people with disabilities. People with disabilities mostly come from impoverished families where public services are underdeveloped. Thus, they face disadvantages when participating in online and face-to-face education because the quality of infrastructure and learning materials is inadequate. The difficulties for education for people with disabilities are also exacerbated by climate...

Despite of the fact that, disability issue as well as person with disability has been investigated and applied these research results in practice to support them to cover their basic human rights, be fully developed and included into the communities. However, researches on climate change with its impacts on the disabilty and how person with disability overcomes and adapts to climate change are considered as a limitation in the country. The contents of paper focuses on a very first step of...

The article poses an idea to ensure children's right to access to information, education on environmental protection (EPE) and skills to respond to natural disasters and climate change (CC) for children with disabilities from an early age through educational and therapeutic programs, rehabilitation at Early Intervention Centers. The program will include 2 main components: Component 1 provides information about the surrounding environment and environmental protection education. Component 2...

The development of deep learning (DL) technology provides an opportunity for accurate prediction and effective control of complex building systems. However, despite the high prediction performance of DL models, few studies integrate DL with the model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for improving building management. In this study, a DL-based MPC framework using encoder-decoder recurrent neural network is developed for real-time control of building thermal environment to exploit the...

The development of deep learning (DL) technology provides an opportunity for accurate prediction and effective control of complex building systems. However, despite the high prediction performance of DL models, few studies integrate DL with the model predictive control (MPC) algorithm for improving building management. In this study, a DL-based MPC framework using encoder-decoder recurrent neural network is developed for real-time control of building thermal environment to exploit the...

Several relationships between air temperature and work performance have been published. We reanalysed the one developed in 2006 by Seppänen et al.; which is probably the best known. We found that even when significant, its prediction accuracy is very low (R2 = 0.05, MAE = 1.9%, RMSE = 3.1%). We consequently reviewed the literature and found 35 studies on the effects of temperature on office work performance. We used Seppänen et al.’s approach to normalise the data reported in these studies...

Thermal comfort is a critical component of indoor environments, especially in schools where learning is the main objective. However, thermal comfort comes at a price that many schools are unable to afford. Therefore, it is critical to determine a method to lower the energy costs of a building while still maintaining occupant thermal comfort. The objective of this study is to investigate how three indoor environmental parameters of air speed, humidity, and air temperature influence energy and...

This paper shows the findings of an in-depth interviewing study on the awareness and responses of parents of children with disabilities to climate change and air pollution. The study was conducted in a sample of 87 parents. It found that: 1) The parents have had common awareness and concern about the problems; 2) Their children have been being more vulnerable to climate change and air pollution, particularly more school days off and less learning performance; & 3) The parents showed...

This article presents the most basic issues about climate change, air pollution and its negative impacts on human life, including children with disabilities. Climate change is a change of climate and of related components including oceans, land, Earth's surface, and the glacial atmosphere, such as increasing temperature, melting ice, and rising sea levels... Air pollution is a negative change of components in the air mainly due to smoke, dust, foreign gases, causing odors, reducing...

The article presents the interrelationship between climate change and sustainable development, thereby showing the importance of climate change education for children including children with disabilities to the sustainable development of each country in particular and globally. At the same time, through studying the orientation of climate change education for children in general and the characteristics, abilities and special needs of children with disabilities, the article proposes basic...