Thermal comfort is influenced by climate, expectations and adaptation opportunities. Hence the emergence of adaptive thermal comfort standards. Unfortunately, international adaptive standards and much of the underlying literature, are based on data collected from middle-income individuals in office or apartment blocks, raising the question of their validity in other contexts. This paper is the first large-scale investigation of the applicability of these standards to populations living in refugee/displacement camps, to establish whether comfort theory needs to be modified for such populations. This was achieved through highly difficult, data collection in camps in Jordan, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Peru. The data collected consists of 1982 rows of personal variables and concurrent environmental measurements. From these, the thermal comfort boundaries of the displaced were found to be wider (...

Millions of displaced people are housed in shelters that generally consist of a single room, meaning that activities including cooking, sleeping and socializing all take place in the same space. Therefore, indoor air quality can be poor, resulting in estimated 20,000 displaced people dying prematurely every year. Very few studies considered the issue and all within one country. This paper describes the first comprehensive study investigating air quality in shelters by looking at Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Particulate Matter (PM), and CO2 in ten locations within Peru, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Jordan, Turkey and Bangladesh. It has the aim of: (i) discovering how widespread the issue is, (ii) identifying some of the causes, (iii) whether it is linked to cultural and behavioural factors, (iv) location and climate, or (v) shelters’ materials or design. Results revealed very harmful level...