Adaptation and Thermal Resilience Construction in Subtropical Urban Communities

Under the context of global climate change, cities in China’s subtropical regions (such as southern areas) are facing frequent extreme climate events, including extreme heat, heavy rainfall, and typhoons, which pose significant threats to the livability of communities and the safety of residents’ lives and property. In this context, subtropical urban communities generally encounter challenges of insufficient adaptability when responding to climate risks, and the current state of their climate resilience urgently requires improvement. Although existing climate resilience assessment frameworks (such as CCRI) and related methods have made some exploratory efforts, traditional approaches (e.g., assessments based on “climate change-induced heat attenuation”) often fail to directly describe the dynamic responses of community thermal environments, lacking applicability and precision, and thus struggle to meet the demands of community-level refined and actionable assessments (Rahif et al., 2021). Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a set of thermal resilience assessment technologies and generation methods that can accurately and directly evaluate the performance of community buildings and thermal environments under extreme events. This study focuses on the climate adaptation capacity of urban communities in China’s subtropical regions, emphasizing the enhancement of community climate adaptability through natural methods and delving into the thermal resilience of existing buildings and communities. Serving as a bridge, we employ case analysis and data-driven research, covering the following aspects: methods for assessing and generating building thermal resilience, the impact of extreme weather on building thermal resilience, the application of building performance information in thermal resilience assessment, the determination and visualization of thermal resilience stage indicators, and the development and implementation of thermal resilience generation systems for existing buildings and communities. These research directions span multiple dimensions from theory to practice and from technology to systems, aiming to strengthen the capacity of buildings and communities to cope with extreme weather and safeguard residents’ health and safety. Additionally, we propose an innovative thermal resilience generation method that is not only applicable to extreme weather scenarios such as power outages and heatwaves but can also be extended to urban heat island effects and special residential environments involving social welfare considerations.