Sustainable transition of cultural heritage: Opportunities, risks, and challenges

An effective sustainable transition requires a holistic multidimensional approach in which numerous stakeholders, ranging from governments at different levels to businesses and educational organizations, operate in a systematic fashion. Significant efforts have been placed in this area in recent years, especially to account for the effects of climate change (Pathak et al., 2022). Cultural heritage has been recognized to be able to play a guiding role in supporting climate-resilient development pathways because “cultural factors shape the enabling condition for adaptation and mitigation, including whether and how people respond to appeals for climate action” (ICOMOS Climate Change & Cultural Heritage Working Group, 2019). This scenario forms the basis for future challenges to be addressed in cultural heritage, requiring multidisciplinary approaches and expertise. In this context, this chapter focuses on the most recent advancements in cooling and heat mitigation technologies developed in recent years to address regional climate change and urban overheating, therefore highlighting opportunities, risks, and challenges involved in their development and verifications. Cool paints are a well-established cooling technology capable of passively lowering the temperatures of buildings during the daytime when compared to conventional paints due to their ability to reflect significant incoming solar radiation from the building and absorb less solar energy. As urban overheating is becoming more prevalent, superior cooling technology for future building envelopes is required to mitigate the intensity of future cooling demands. Supercool materials represent leading candidates, and their distinguishing feature relies on their ability to exploit an additional cooling mechanism that consists of daytime radiative cooling, and that enables cooling to occur within the wavelengths of the atmospheric window (8 13 μm), therefore exploiting space as a heat sink (Gentle & Smith, 2015; Raman et al., 2014; Rephaeli et al., 2013). In the following section, the most recent technologies proposed in the literature for supercool materials have been reported and organized under the categories shown in Fig. 2.1 that are based on the structure of the technology. The subsequent section has been dedicated to modulating or switching technologies that have been introduced in recent years to overcome or prevent the overcooling that supercool materials can potentially lead to during cold weather conditions. In this manner, the modulating technologies aim to preserve outstanding cooling performance during hot weather conditions while limiting or eliminating the possible need for additional heating and associated energy and costs that might be required under cold conditions (Khan et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2016; Santamouris, 2020; Ulpiani et al., 2020). This change in performance is obtained by means of a modulating capability embedded within the material or system. In this chapter, the switching technologies have been distinguished between passive and active ones. The final part of the chapter is devoted to addressing some of the key aspects that need to be considered when applying supercool materials and their modulating technologies within the context of the built heritage.