Research Project Advisory Board Update

The scope of the project is to develop resilient retrofit strategies for residential buildings across six climate hazards.  The project is at the half-way point. CHBA has been part of the advisory board since the beginning in 2022.  The NRC researchers presented their findings and asked the advisory board members for new research needs flooding, wildfire, wildfire smoke and overheating and touched on building envelope failures in light of climate shifts as well as structural upgrades for permafrost. One presentation focused on modelling for cost effectiveness of the resilient solutions.

Research highlights

Some highlights of the findings included:

• NRC evaluated the performance of flooding barriers for openings like windows and doors in a research facility that simulates flooding, waves and impact from floating debris.
• In a study on reducing the overheating risk in affordable housing, NRC found that tenant behaviour contributes to the risk of overheating, but that reflective paint and low-cost, passive shading measures reduced the risk of overheating by 20% while installing a phase-change cladding product could reduce that risk by another 20%.
• NRC is considering writing National Technical Specifications - a standards-type document - recognized by the Standards Council of Canada - intended to respond more quickly to evolving market for some of the innovative cooling  solutions evaluated by the research team. 

CHBA suggestions

• Throughout the workshop, CHBA suggested using "cost neutrality" as a guiding principle for retrofit costing, and improving communication of research outcomes—such as publishing clear, actionable findings in simple one-pagers targeted at industry professionals and building owners.
• CHBA also suggested that all the research on hazard exposure, mapping and respective resilient solutions should become part of a single, nationally consistent, locally specific, simple-to-access climate portal for industry professional and homeowners alike.

NRC invitation to participate

NRC asked advisory board members to identify any potential MURB retrofit projects that could be used as field trial for the research above. If you would like to get involved or have further questions, please contact Frank Lohmann (frank.lohmann@chba.ca) 

For more information see the slide deck from the researchers attached.