Abstract

The pre-COP26 measures agreed during the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change would have only reduced predicted 2030 emissions by 7.5%; whereas reductions of 30% are needed to stay on the least-cost pathway for 2 °C and 55% for 1.5 °C. There is a pressing need for every sector in industry, including the entire building and construction supply chain, to decarbonise by 2050. Hence, the construction industry is faced with the challenge and opportunity to reduce energy demand, improve process efficiency, and reduce carbon emissions.

In this context, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) helps to quantify the environmental pressures, the trade-offs, and areas for achieving improvements considering the full life cycle of built assets from design to recycling. However, current approaches to LCA do not factor in consistently (both in the foreground and background inventory systems) life cycle variations in (a) building usage, (b) energy supply (including from renewable sources), and (c) building and environmental regulations, as well as other, changes over the building/district lifetime. These include: (a) change in the energy mix of a building / district or upgrading / retrofitting the energy system(s) in place; and (b) time-increase of energy demand during the lifetime of a building due to a wide range of reasons, including changes in occupancy patterns. 

The talk will elaborate on the concept of semantic-based real-time LCA to address tthe above limitations, including temporal and spatial variations in the local built and environmental ecosystem, and thus inform an effective net-zero trajectory