Naturally ventilated buildings have been worldwide increasingly welcomed, given the current global awareness toward environmental sustainability, indoor health-quality and renewable energy. As Natural Ventilation (NV) performance relies on building design and interaction with the local environment, its potential benefits are not always easy to take advantage of, and thus sets up a vital field of study. This paper provides an overview of investigations on the subject by collecting researches focused on thermal comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality.

Cities are crucial sites for achieving socio-technical transitions in technology and infrastructure systems. Raising building energy efficiency (BEE) through new construction or retrofitting holds particular relevance to sustainability transitions since this requires diffusion of new technologies and energy management practices. In pursuit of this, city policymakers around the world are increasingly utilising mixes of multiple policy instruments.

In 2009, the European Union adopted high-level goals for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas reductions with targets set toward the year 2020. This was followed in 2012 by adoption of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) (2012/27/EU), which included as a major component a requirement for Member States to create Energy Efficiency Obligations Schemes (EEOSs) on energy companies or equivalent alternative measures, and those provisions have now been in effect for three years.