The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of ventilation as a transmission mitigation
strategy. However, there is a widely-held concern that a drop in outdoor temperatures during
wintertime may impact thermal comfort in the context of naturally ventilated classrooms. This is a
concern which has not been widely investigated by peer-reviewed empirical studies. The aim of this
paper is to review the available literature on the impact of natural ventilation during winter on thermal
comfort. Using the replicable search processes of a systematic literature review adopted from medical
research practice, 142 articles were retrieved from four search databases (Science direct, Scopus,
PubMed, and Google Scholar). Analysis of these 142 articles revealed that most studies have
particularly focused on the assessment of ventilation conditions, especially in non-naturally ventilated
spaces, and that there were only 5 articles that empirically investigated the impact of natural
ventilation on thermal comfort during winter in sufficient detail. This shows a significant gap within
the body of literature, meaning that the findings from this study can only be treated as tentative, with
further research required
