CSTB and Banque des Territoires sign a partnership to identify social housing buildings vulnerable to high heat in PrioRéno

Heat waves observed in France are increasing in frequency and intensity. Faced with this effect of climate change, more and more homes are experiencing overheating, causing discomfort for occupants. These heat waves have an impact on their health, particularly on the most vulnerable, such as the elderly, pregnant women, and young children. These episodes of extreme heat also have an impact on household energy consumption through increased use of active cooling solutions.

Adapting these homes to the effects of climate change is essential. The first step is to identify them in order to plan operations optimally.

The ISB-DH Building Overheating Indicator, developed by the CSTB as part of the BDNB, quantifies indoor overheating during a heatwave in mainland France and Corsica. Specifically, this indicator is based on the building's location, its morphology, and its construction processes. Using the 2003 heatwave as a reference, it calculates, hour by hour, the difference between the apartment's temperature and a bearable temperature (X d° during the day and Y d° during the night). The sum of these differences gives the building's overheating indicator calculated in degree-hours of discomfort, in line with RE2020.

The CSTB is now making this ISB-DH indicator available to the Banque des Territoires for free provision to the social housing sector in the PrioRéno Social Housing reference platform.

This platform, developed by Banque des Territoires – in partnership with the Union Sociale pour l'Habitat, the French government, Enedis, and GRDF – provides social landlords with easy access to a set of data relating to the condition of their housing stock. It helps them define their renovation prioritization strategy, taking into account decarbonization and climate change adaptation issues. With the integration of the Building Overheating Indicator, PrioRéno is enriched with a key feature in the face of climate change.

For Étienne Crépon – President of the CSTB: "The BDNB lists all available public data for each building in France and provides an identity sheet for approximately 40 million buildings. Using all their scientific and technical skills, CSTB experts extract indicators from this data to inform the asset strategy of social landlords as well as national and local public policies. I welcome this partnership, which will make this work directly accessible to social landlords via the tool that the Banque des Territoires has developed for them."

For Kosta Kastrinidis – Deputy Director of the Bank of the Territories: "At Banque des Territoires, we have always been the benchmark financier for the social housing sector. We are also a particularly attentive partner. As such, we improve our PrioRéno reference platform every year in order to provide OLSs with ever more free data essential for managing their built assets. Thanks to the recognized expertise of the CSTB, we are now taking a new step forward: social landlords will now be able to benefit from PrioRéno, the data needed to develop climate change adaptation plans. I am delighted with this great step forward: putting data innovation at the service of the social housing sector is serving the general interest!"