Draft. These pages were imported from the ARC Technical Criteria document (16 April 2026) and have not yet been reviewed in this format. Several thresholds are still being settled and are flagged on the pages concerned.

What influences thermal comfort

The personal and environmental factors comfort depends on, and why a single universal building standard across climates and cultures is so hard.

Thermal comfort is influenced by many factors that relate to the user

• clothing level
• activity level
• acclimatisation
• time spent outdoors
• expectation of the experience
• a person’s ‘thermal history’ with air conditioning (either adaptive comfort use or habituation)
• etc

and that also relate to the surrounding environment

• air temperature
• radiant temperature of surfaces
• solar radiation
• air speed
• humidity

It is extremely difficult to apply both a practical and economically viable universal building standard across different socio-economic contexts, cultures and regions with different regional and micro-climates. Different combinations of thermal comfort factors also interact with climate change, social, economic and cultural factors in complex ways.

Whether a particular building design or feature will deliver adequate thermal comfort in a specific localised context can also be hard to reliably assess at concept or even detailed design stage.

Designers and builders are often ‘flying blind’ because of a lack of measured building performance data – there is simply too little or no feedback for designers as to how their buildings actually perform in the real world.

Adopting ‘tried and trusted’ ways of building can sometime help. However, where evidence of effective performance of existing traditional buildings and features is hard to come by, or inconclusive, traditional approaches to designing buildings can also risk poor performance: this risk is increasing as the result of fossil fuel pollution and environmental degradation of ecosystems which has led to increasing regional and localised changes in climatic conditions. Historic or modern building methods and designs that are adequately comfortable now may not be comfortable - or even safe - in the coming years. Borrowing from historical experience may not always help in the context of a rapidly changing climate – we must base our approach for the future on evidence-based, monitored and proven solutions, wherever possible.

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Source: ARC Technical Criteria - 20
Overview · confidence medium · Imported 2026-09-12, not yet reviewed · next review 2026-12-12
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Citation key: thermal-comfort-factors