Urbanization,
slum redevelopment, and population growth
will lead
to unprecedented levels of residential building construction in “low-
and middle-income” (LMI) countries in the coming decades. However,
less than 50% of previous residential building life-cycle assessment
(LCA) reviews included LMI countries. Moreover, all reviews that included
LMI countries only considered formal (cement–concrete) buildings,
while more than 800 million people in these countries lived in informal
settlements. We analyze LCA literature and define three building types
based on durability: formal, semiformal, and informal. These exhaustively
represent residential buildings in LMI countries. For each type, we
define dominant archetypes from across the world, based on construction
materials. To address the data deficiency and lack of transparency
in LCA studies, we develop a reproducibility metric for building LCAs.
We find that the countries with the most reproducible studies are
India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Mexico, and Brazil. Only 7 out of 54 African
countries have reproducible studies focused on either the embodied
or use phase. Maintenance, refurbishment, and end-of-life phases are
included in hardly any studies in the LMI LCA literature. Lastly,
we highlight the necessity for studying current, traditional buildings
to provide a benchmark for future studies focusing on energy and material
efficiency strategies.