In the context of the escalating challenge of climate change, optimizing buildings’ energy performance has become a critical research area, yet studies specifically targeting library buildings are scarce. This study addresses this gap by investigating the impact of multi-objective optimization on energy efficiency and occupant comfort in educational library buildings under future climate scenarios. Utilizing the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), this research optimizes a range of building parameters, including the cooling and heating setpoints, air change rates, shading device depths, window visible transmittance, and window gas types. The optimization aims to balance energy consumption and comfort, using simulations based on future weather data for the years 2020, 2050, and 2080. The results indicate that the optimized solutions can significantly reduce the heating energy by up to 95.34% and the cooling energy by up to 63.74% compared to the baseline models, while maintaining or improving the occupant comfort levels. This study highlights the necessity for dynamic, responsive architectural designs that can adapt to changing environmental conditions, ensuring both sustainability and occupant well-being. Furthermore, integrating these building-level optimizations into a City Information Model (CIM) framework can enhance urban planning and development, contributing to more resilient and energy-efficient cities. These findings underscore the importance of sustainable design practices in the context of climate change and the critical role of advanced optimization techniques in achieving energy-efficient, comfortable educational spaces.

The campus courtyards in the Lingnan area are commonly used spaces. Therefore, their thermal comfort is highly important for improving user satisfaction. This study conducted field research on 18 courtyards in four universities in Lingnan to explore the effects of their architectural design factors on the thermal environment. Relevant studies have proved that courtyards are cost-effective in microclimate regulation, and individual factors such as the scale and openness of the courtyards have also been shown to have an effect on the thermal comfort of the courtyards. This study synthesizes multidimensional architectural design factors to explore and analyze the thermal environments of college courtyards. Physiologically equivalent temperature (PET) is selected as the thermal comfort evaluation index for the study and the conclusions are as follows: (1) The thermal environment is the most important factor influencing visitors to the courtyards (22%), and good thermal comfort improves the efficiency of using the college courtyards; (2) the courtyards have a positive microclimate regulating function, and a cooling effect occurs in 80% of them; and (3) the floor location, type, orientation, and sky view factor (SVF) of the courtyards are the main design factors affecting the thermal environment and PET. The first three factors were negatively correlated with PET (p < 0.05),and SVF was positively correlated with PET (p = 0.651). Passive courtyard design strategies are presented based on the findings of this study.