Tempering The Temporary: Improving Thermal Comfort and Human Well-being in Relief Shelters

Abstract

Despite guidelines encouraging climate responsive designs, post-disaster/conflict temporary shelters are frequently deployed across substantially different climates, resulting in anecdotes of unbearable interior temperatures. Therefore, in order to test their climateappropriateness, we performed thermal simulations of fourteen of the most common shelter types, testing these designs in thirteen different climate zones. Evaluating these shelters based on adaptive thermal comfort threshold temperatures proved inadequate as interior operative temperatures frequently far exceeded this threshold. Therefore, we proposed using 35°C [95°F] and 12°C [54°F] for the upper and lower health-risk temperature thresholds to evaluate thermal safety. In several cases, the simulations identified interior conditions outside these limits, which could pose health risks to occupants, especially to vulnerable populations, e.g. the elderly, sick and children. We then used thermal simulation to test improvements to temporary shelter design and synthesize new designs, and to suggest quantitative guidelines to improve thermal safety.