Designer's toolbox for Building LCA

The perception that life cycle impacts must be considered during the design of a building is common amongst practitioners (Roberts et al., 2020). The need to rely on Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) already in the early design stages drives practitioners to search for tools and data that might support the insertion of environmental performance information on their typical workflows (Nilsen and Bohne, 2019; Potrč Obrecht et al., 2020). A survey performed within the activities of Subtask 1 showed that, generally, most architects and other stakeholders take environmental aspects into account (more than 90% of respondents), so almost all of them are familiar with the topic. The ones that actually rely on LCA, however, represent only 31% of respondents. 42% plan to use LCA in the medium term, and the remaining 27% do not plan to use it (Balouktsi et al., 2020). In order to increase the number of design practitioners using LCA in their daily practice, two aspects must be addressed: (i) designers’ basic knowledge about LCA and (ii) versatility and ease of use of building LCA tools. Regarding the former, the willingness to acquire knowledge to answer to the increased demand for buildings’ environmental performance information will depend on design professionals themselves. A proper use of available tools requires a comprehension about the environmental mechanism measured by relevant indicators, which would allow the ability to interpret calculation results, and a good understanding of how design decisions influence the results (Balouktsi et al., 2020). The latter aspect, on the other hand, depends on the different goals of the tools’ developers. To ensure effectiveness, a tool must be tailored to the planning phase, the user’s knowledge, and the concerns of the different stakeholders involved in the design process. Accordingly, either a wide variety of tools are needed, or each tool must be scalable and capable of adapting to the users’ needs and knowledge (IEA-EBC, 2004; Millet et al., 2007). The focus of the report is to categorise available tools to make sure the designer can make an informed decision regarding what is (are) the best tool(s) to choose from, according to his or her specific needs.