Dynamic climate resilience of Mediterranean educational buildings: A multidimensional assessment of resilient cooling strategies under future extreme heat conditions

Energy efficiency has been positioned as a central response to climate change mitigation in the building sector. However, Mediterranean warming is intensifying the combined impacts of heatwaves and urban heat island (UHI) effects. This context reveals the limitations of energy efficiency in addressing overheating risk and exposes a critical gap in the climate-adaptation capacity of educational buildings, an underrepresented typology. This paper presents a multidimensional approach for assessing building climate resilience through resilient cooling strategies. The approach is applied to a university building in Terrassa, Spain, under four climate scenarios: present conditions (TMY2020), mid-future conditions (RCP8.5-TMY2050), the most severe/longest and the most intense future heatwaves (HW), including UHI effects. Dynamic indicators are used to quantify the effectiveness of cooling strategies in contributing to climate resilience under extreme heat conditions. The results for energy performance and thermal comfort under typical-weather scenarios showed that, under TMY2050, Exterior Blinds and Natural Ventilation-24h reduced cooling demand by 8–15% and increased comfort hours by 9–35%. However, under heatwaves, resilience was determined by temporal performance. During the most severe/longest HW, the Base case required about 21 kWh/m² of cooling in only 29 days, while Natural Ventilation-24h delayed critical overheating by 9 days and reduced recovery to 2 days. Under the most intense HW, recovery reached 35 days in the Base case but decreased to 1–2 days with Combined scenario and Natural Ventilation-24h. The proposed multidimensional methodology captures complementary resilience dimensions, providing a framework for resilience-oriented retrofit assessment under representative climates and future heatwaves.