Introduction¶
The ARC expert group's current understanding of key technical aspects of thermal comfort and wellbeing, and ARC's building performance standard for minimising occupant overheating in hot, and hot and humid, climates.
This document sets out the ARC expert group's current understanding of various key technical aspects of thermal comfort and wellbeing. It includes our thinking on how to increase building performance resilience in the face of intermittent power supply and problems related to the cost and availability of key building materials and mechanical services equipment.
It outlines ARC's building performance standard for minimising occupant overheating in buildings in hot, and hot and humid climates.
The ARC Cool Buildings Standard is conceived as being helpful for countries in climate-vulnerable regions, where there exist challenging socio-economic conditions that do not favour easily delivering new and refurbished buildings to the Passivhaus Standard in one step.
The document should also be used as reference for those using ARC's educational materials.
As our understanding and experience increases, this document will be updated - please regularly check that you are referencing the latest version.
Where to start¶
- Success criteria for building modelling and performance
- what the standard is aiming at
- The ARC framework - the two Steps and three Zones
- The comfort model - how performance is judged
- The Cool Buildings Programme - what ARC provides
Status of this wiki
These pages were imported from the ARC Technical Criteria document of 16 April 2026 and have not yet been reviewed page by page in this format. Several thresholds are unresolved in the source and are flagged on the pages concerned.
Source: ARC Technical Criteria - Introduction
Overview · confidence high · Imported 2026-08-29, not yet reviewed · next review 2026-11-29
Tags: overview, standard, introduction
Citation key: introduction