Tackling uncertainty in life cycle assessments for the built environment: A review

Marsh, Ellen; Allen, Stephen; Hattam, Laura

doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2022.109941

Cited by 42 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 121 publications

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“…Specifically, studies often neglected to clearly articulate LCA methods, data included, assumptions, and uncertainty. This issue has been highlighted in other studies by Bamber et al (2020) and Marsh et al (2023). Transparency is essential for informed decision making and can have a significant influence on decision making and assessment results (Cooper and Fava 2006).…”

Section: Increased Methodological Transparencymentioning

confidence: 91%

“…It is imperative that designers understand the uncertainties and limitations involved with different data selection choices. For example, the reviewed case studies heavily relied on the use of process data which is known to underestimate embodied environmental flows (Ward et al 2018), including EPDs which can be challenging to streamline into LCA workflows due to issues regarding transparency, comparability and harmonisation (Marsh et al 2023). These considerations are particularly pertinent in regions of the world where data are limited.…”

Section: Increased Methodological Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integrating life cycle assessment into the building design process—a review

Prideaux,

Allacker,

H Crawford

et al. 2024

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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The environmental effects associated with buildings are significant, and include considerable contributions towards global greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, and waste generation. Until recently, mitigation efforts have concentrated on improving the operational energy efficiency of buildings, largely ignoring embodied environmental effects. However, focusing solely on increasing energy efficiency can inadvertently cause an rise in embodied effects. It is therefore critical that embodied effects are considered alongside operational effects and are actively integrated into design decisions throughout the building design process. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to achieve this, however, it is often perceived as difficult to incorporate into design workflows, or requiring specialist knowledge. Additionally, it is not always clear how well aligned LCA approaches are with the building design process. To address this gap, this study aims to provide a detailed analysis of LCA approaches, to assess how well they align with building design stages, and to identify key characteristics, including LCA tools and environmental data used to conduct assessments. A review of academic and grey literature is conducted. Three primary approaches are identified for integrating LCA into the building design process: simplified, detailed and incremental LCA. Simplified LCA uses streamlined data inputs and typically targets a specific design stage. Detailed LCA follows a traditional approach with comprehensive user inputs and results. Incremental LCA progressively evolves the assessment based on design requirements and available building data at each design stage. An analysis of each approach is performed, and key user requirements are mapped against the early design, and detailed design stages. Results reveal that no single approach fully satisfies all design requirements. Findings also highlight a lack of incremental LCA approaches and challenges operationalising these techniques. These approaches often rely on complicated methods or tools not suitable for common design workflows, or they are in early development and require additional verification before implementation.

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Section: Increased Methodological Transparencymentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Increased Methodological Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating life cycle assessment into the building design process—a review

Prideaux,

Allacker,

H Crawford

et al. 2024

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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“…Currently, LCA software either include qualitative uncertainty assessment methods or quantitative methods that lack the level of detail needed to provide accurate emission profiles [43][44][45][46]. Furthermore, most EPDs do not capture any uncertainty within their reports [84]. Thus, the integration of a standardized scenario-aware MCS framework would provide more insightful results and allow for more robust conclusions to be drawn.…”

Section: Summary Of Gained Insights and Model Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing uncertainty in building material emissions using scenario-aware Monte Carlo simulation

Bin Thaneya,

Gursel,

Kane

et al. 2024

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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Global greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment remain high, driving innovative approaches to develop and adopt building materials that can mitigate some of those emissions. However, life-cycle assessment (LCA) practices still lack standardized quantitative uncertainty assessment frameworks, which are urgently needed to robustly assess mitigation efforts. Previous works emphasize the importance of accounting for the three types of uncertainties that may exist within any quantitative assessment: parameter, scenario, and model uncertainty. Herein, we develop a quantitative uncertainty assessment framework that distinguishes between different types of uncertainties and suggest how these uncertainties could be handled systematically through a scenario-aware Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS). We demonstrate the framework’s decision-informing power through a case study of two multilevel Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) manufacturing scenarios. The MCS utilizes a first-principles-based OPC life-cycle inventory, which mitigates some of the model uncertainty that may exist in other empirical-based cement models. Remaining uncertainties are handled by scenario specification or sampling from developed probability distribution functions. We also suggest a standardized method for fitting distributions to parameter data by enumerating through and implementing distributions based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The detailed parameter breakdown allows for developing emission distributions for each process of OPC manufacturing. This detailed approach highlights how individual parameters, along with scenario framing, impacts OPC emissions. Another key takeaway includes relating the uncertainty of each process to its contributions to total OPC emissions, which can guide LCA modelers in allocating data collection and refinement efforts on processes with the highest contribution to cumulative uncertainty. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to provide a standardized framework that can provide robust estimates of building material emissions and be readily integrated within any uncertainty assessment.

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“…According to Bamber et al [11], less than 20 % of the papers published between 2014 and 2018 quantified uncertainties. This can be explained by lack of information in some environmental databases [10,13], difficulties and lack of tools to address uncertainties (especially for correlated data) [16,17], or complexity of communicating and interpreting LCA results with uncertainties [9,18]. Heijungs et al (2019) emphasised the need to tackle these challenges and recommended to stop producing LCA results without uncertainties.…”

Section: Uncertainties In Lcamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, many sources of uncertainties and variabilities can affect the environmental modelling of products [7][8][9][10][11]. Tackling these uncertainties is one of the challenges of building LCA identified by Nwodo and Anumba [12], especially in the case of comparative LCA (CompLCA) and in the early design phase of a building project [13]. In this work, a methodology is proposed to deal with uncertainties in CompLCA of building design alternatives.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%