According to a Chinese building energy demand report of 2016, building consumption is accelerating at a spectacular rate, especially for urban public buildings. In this study, various design parameters that meet the principle of climate adaptation are proposed to achieve the unity of energy utilization and indoor thermal comfort level. According to the local energy conservation codes, five typical benchmark geometric models were established in Open Studio (Sketch-Up plug-in) for sites representative of various climates, meanwhile, adopting the engine of Energy Plus (EP-Launch) to calculate the instrument definition file (IDF), respectively, for assessing the coupling relationship between energy consumption as well as thermal comfort. Results implied that based on the time proportion (8760 h) that met the level 1 comfort range, total energy reductions of different Chinese climate regions were different. Among them, the severe cold zone (SCZ—Changchun) and hot summer and cold winter zone (HSCW—Shanghai) appeared to have the greatest energy saving potential with 18–24% and 16–19%, respectively, while the cold zone (CZ—Beijing) and mild zone (MZ—Kunming) approximately equaled 15% and 12–15%, and the saving space of the hot summer and warm winter zone (HSWW—Haikou) appeared relatively low, only around 5–7%. Although the simulation results may be limited by the number of parameter settings, the main ones are under consideration seriously, which is further indication that there is still much room for appropriate improvements in the local public building energy efficiency codes.

China’s research on and specific implementation of energy saving for buildings are mainly concentrated in urban areas, but according to 2016 statistics, the rural population accounts for 42.65% of the total population, so rural housing has considerable energy-saving potential. However, the degree of attention to the energy consumption of rural houses needs to be improved. Regarding the research on and implementation of passive energy-saving strategies for residences, compared with centralized urban high-rise residences, rural residences mainly have independent courtyards, with a flexible layout and easier transformation. In this study, a system that uses the common cold lanes in traditional villages and buildings’ exterior walls was constructed, and the indoor spaces of courtyard buildings in southern Shaanxi were completely passively cooled in summer. This system can be completely separated from the supply of artificial energy by relying on the accumulation and buoyancy effects of air in patios and cold lanes and the hot-pressure ventilation in buildings to cool the buildings and greatly improve indoor ventilation efficiency. As the building is ventilated and cooled, the air wall formed in the system can effectively prevent direct contact between the outdoor and indoor temperatures and reduce the impact of thermal wall radiation on the interior. In previous studies on the passive design of courtyard houses, scholars considered the effect of thermal wall radiation on indoor temperature in simulations. Therefore, in this study, we also separately calculated whether to consider the difference between the situation with and without wall heat radiation (WHR) when simulating thermal conversion. The final results show that when the cooling system was adopted, the annual cooling load of the whole building was 4786.494 kW·h without WHR. However, with WHR, the cooling load reduction was 2989.128 kW·h, a difference of 1797.336 kW·h.

Rural arts events (triennials/festivals) are mainly aimed at local and regional revitalization. This exhibition-driven tourism (unlike traditional festivals, conferences, and exhibitions) has existed for more than 20 years in Japan. The curators of exhibition-driven tourism hope that these events can promote the economy and stop population decline as a result of the aging population. Therefore, this paper attempts to evaluate the effects of urban and rural arts event tourism in local and neighborhood areas in Niigata, Japan from the perspective of SDG 8.9. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and Water and Land Niigata Art Festival were chosen as case studies. Panel data (1997–2019) concerning tourists, income, and population in Niigata were evaluated using multiple empirical methods with descriptive correlation statistics (simple linear regression (SLR) and one-way ANOVA) and spatial analysis (Moran’s I). Through multiple-method analysis, the positive impacts of urban and rural arts event tourism in local and neighborhood areas in relation to Sustainable Development Goal 8.9 were evaluated. The findings presented herein have meaningful implications for tourism academia and the industry in general.

A large number of people in China still live in rural villages. The indoor environment of these rural dwellings directly affects the quality of life of the occupants. Nevertheless, constrained by the quality of dwelling construction, rural buildings have poorer indoor environments and, at the same time, have a higher operating energy consumption. However, inadequate attention has been given to the summer thermal environment in cold regions. This work has been carried out around the thermal environment of rural residences in cold regions during summer. Field measurements, questionnaires, and data analysis were used in this study. We recorded the indoor and outdoor thermal environment parameters on a typical summer day in the Linyi rural area. Moreover, the subjective sensations and thermal adaptive behaviors of the participants were recorded in detail with a questionnaire. Linear regression showed that the neutral temperature for residents in summer was 27.52 °C, with acceptable temperatures ranging from 25.14 °C to 29.9 °C. Age and gender differences were found to affect the occupants’ sensation of thermal comfort and humidity, as well as their thermal adaptive behavior. In addition, a thermal adaptive model has been constructed in the study, which will further enrich the thermal adaptive investigation and provide a scientifically sound reference for the renovation and development of the local rural areas.

Nowadays, evaporatively cooled office buildings commonly observed in dry hot areas in summer of China. However, few dedicated studies to record the local residents' thermal comfort and adaptability in these buildings. The contribution of adaptive comfort theory on thermal perception still remains unclear for optimizing office building design parameters. Hence, to deeper probe the adaptive thermal comfort of the related indoor environment, a field study of office buildings during summer considering evaporative cooling air conditioned (ECA) and naturally ventilated (NV) mode was conducted in Turpan, China. Based on 931 valid datasets collected from questionnaires, we found that the neutral temperature (T_n) of 28.4 °C in ECA group, 0.6 °C lower than NV group (29.0 °C). A lower air temperature (T_a) and higher humidity (RH)/air-velocity (V_a) were expected in two modes, and V_a has a stronger influence than RH on mean thermal sensation votes (MTSV). Meanwhile, occupants can adapt to current indoor environment through physiological, psychological and behavioral adjustments, while the clothing regulation had limited effect on MTSV unless the outdoor temperature exceeds 38 °C. Whether in ECA or NV mode, the predicted mean votes (PMV) model overestimated actual thermal sensation when operative temperature (T_op) beyond 28 °C. Adaptive models were also proved varied from that in current standards, which indicated that they were not suitable for evaluating the studied buildings in Turpan. Above findings could suggest us a better understanding of the occupants' thermal adaptability, thereby providing the reference of design parameters revision and passive strategies for local newly/renovated buildings.