Surveying the environmental life-cycle performance assessments: Practice and context at early building design stages

Abstract

The international greenhouse gas agreements call for mitigations in the building industry. Thus, the number of scientific publications about life-cycle performance assessment (LCPA) follows an exponential trend since the 2000s. However, previous surveys highlighted that the use of these methods is still not a common practice. Hence, it is of primary importance to understand the gap between the research intensity, and its low-benefits on the practice. To that end, a set of questions has been compiled and spread as an online survey targeting architects and engineers at the European scale. Thanks to 500 answers, three major obstacles have been highlighted. First, there is a clear lack of demand from real estate developers in a context where there is no lifecycle performance regulation yet. Second, the high cost of the use of LCPA methods disqualifies their use at early design, where the financial risk is at its highest level. Last, there are collaboration issues between architects and engineers, decreasing the LCPA benefits. In addition to previous surveys focusing on the scientific issues of the LCA methodology only, these results provide a unique user-centred knowledge for LCPA software and method developers.