The anthropogenic heat, which primarily consists of emissions from human metabolism, and also the rejected or waste heat from electricity consumption in buildings due to human activities and the requirement for maintaining the thermal environment by human being, is considered as an important contributor to the urban heat island phenomenon and has been studied worldwide. High energy consumption in the urban buildings impacts the urban surface energy budget and causes the emission of anthropogenic heat flux into the atmosphere. Today, with the growing population and growing activities in buildings, much of the concern is focused towards the decrease of anthropogenic heat through low energy consuming and more energy efficient buildings. This study, utilized a validated occupancy probabilistic input model to estimate different building retrofitting solutions on the impact of building energy consumption and further as the basis for building cooling associated anthropogenic heat study. A holistic evaluation of passive, active and combined strategies is tailored for application with high occupancy variation situation such as campus buildings. With the best retrofitting solutions, the campus anthropogenic heat is reduced from 150 W/m(2) to 128 W/m(2), which is considered as very effective. Although the campus buildings are used as an example, this paper demonstrates a generalisation method for the application of retrofitting strategies and efficient building systems in estimating the reduction of anthropogenic heat. The results demonstrate high potential for the campus building retrofitting and the values can contribute as a database for future urban heat island effect estimation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.