Comprendre comment adapter l’immobilier résidentiel et professionnel à la chaleur : la meilleure décision que vous pouvez prendre !

Understanding How to Heat-Adapt Residential and Business Real Estate: The Best Decision You Can Make!

📝 New studies show that many homes, offices, and professional buildings are not adapted to the heat, and that the humanly bearable heat is lower than previously thought. The heat is already affecting living and working conditions, but how to take action ? What to do when you are the owner or manager of an exposed asset and what should be remembered from these studies? ?

🤒 The one published last week by the Abbé-Pierre Foundation[1], which is based on the 2023 energy-info barometer of the National Energy Mediator, indicates that 55% of French households reported having suffered from heat in their homes in 2023 , for at least twenty-four hours. Those most affected by excessive heat are tenants (63%) and those who live in apartments (62%). The summer of 2023 was marked by several episodes of heat waves. The summer of 2024 was hot, and the IPCC's projections for the coming years raise questions about the ability of the affected housing to remain habitable. The study by the Abbé Pierre Foundation simply brings us back to the notion of using exposed goods so that they protect residents from the health and social consequences of heat. 93% of the building stock will be exposed to a high risk by 2050 .

📉 In France, around 85% of housing is over 10 years old and meets standards that have not integrated heat resilience. In the absence of adaptation investment, the asset value of a home can only fall. This is a subject that should seriously concern banking institutions. Property is often used as collateral for loans, and outstanding real estate loans in France amount to 1,300 billion euros in France. Today, the DPE mainly assesses the impact of housing on the environment (GHG emissions, insulation, and therefore energy performance), but nothing is done to assess the impact of climate change on real estate. This is particularly the case for heat resilience.

⚠️Homeowners are not the only ones lacking visibility on this peril. Many daycare centers are located in buildings that are more than 30 years old. The average age of primary schools is over 40 years. The same goes for middle and high schools, many of which were built between 1970 and 1980, and whose Most of the renovation work was devoted to safety and accessibility, but not heat resilience . The observation is no different for the healthcare sector. The average age of EHPAD buildings is 30 to 40 years. That of hospitals fluctuates between 40 and 50 years.

🏭 Finally, offices and industrial premises have nothing to envy from the public real estate stock. Many buildings were built in the 1960s to 1980s, during the period of industrialization. And even though some buildings have been renovated or rehabilitated, there is no indication that working conditions in the heat will be bearable today or in the years to come.

❗ The other aspect we need to consider, which echoes our post of August 6, concerns physiologically tolerable heat and how to measure it. We know that the higher the temperature, the lower productivity, and that beyond 30 degrees it drops by half. What recent studies show[2] [3] is that the threshold beyond which we are physiologically in danger is much lower than we thought .

🌡️ Research from the University of Sydney has shown that the limit of “wet bulb” temperature (WBT), a measure of perceived temperature that combines temperature and humidity, at which A healthy young adult could theoretically survive for six hours, is 31°C . For older people, and workers in physically demanding jobs, life-threatening conditions could occur at lower temperatures.

❄️ The study explores various methods to keep the human body cool in extreme conditions, such as the use of fans, humidification of the skin, and the type of clothing, all of which are adaptations to help individuals manage heat without compromising their health. But first of all, the buildings must be adapted.

📝 The Abbé Pierre Foundation report suggests “ to systematically integrate heat wave adaptation work into state-subsidized energy renovations ". Mandatory diagnostics (DPE, Géorisques, etc.) do not require an assessment of the resilience of a residential or industrial property to climate hazards. Regulations evolve less quickly than the climate.

🎯 An owner who wants to preserve their heritage and the habitability of their home, a business leader who wishes to guarantee the safety of his employees and the profitability of his company, a mayor or a Regional President who wants to preserve the learning conditions of children do not need to wait for the state to regulate . The emergency is human, physiological, and economic. They all need to know what remedial actions they can put in place, based on a transparent and scientific observation of current climatic conditions and their evolution which affect their property.

📊 This is precisely what the Climate Performance Diagnostic (CPD) does . For your home, offices, factories, schools, healthcare facilities, if you do not know the value and evolution over time of the temperature anomaly, the number of hot days or perceived temperatures above 25°C, 30°C, or 35°C that will need to be managed, the number and intensity of heat waves, the number of tropical nights, the energy required to keep the premises below an acceptable temperature...

📣Contact Tardigrade AI ( contact@tardigrade-ai.com ) without delay for a complete diagnosis. It's the best decision you'll make in a long time.

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