Cooling energy resilience of high-rise residential buildings under climate change in Hong Kong

Due to climate change, the increase in electricity demand for building air-conditioning deserves comprehensive investigation during a hot and humid summer. This paper adopted the high-resolution version of the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-1-2-HR) in Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to generate future weather data based on three shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), namely SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5. A 1 km × 1 km resolution helped include the micro-climate effect. The resulting impact on a typical high-rise residential building in Hong Kong in the mid- (2040) and end- (2090) centuries was then analyzed. By choosing five district areas with different geographic natures, it was found that the cooling energy demand increased by 9 % and 29 % at most in the mid- and end-centuries. This corresponded to around 10.4 % per degree Celsius increase in the average ambient temperature. The demand was the highest in the district with a higher latitude. Different mitigation strategies were then applied through the modifications of the passive design, with five strategies yielding positive effects. The combined use of these five effective strategies could offer a tangible reduction in the cooling energy demand by at most 4 % as compared to the existing base case, even under SSP5-8.5 in the end-century. The results highlighted the strengths of these passive design strategies for cooling energy resilience under climate change for a sustainable future. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd.