Supporting the mainstreamed implementation of life cycle assessment in the established German building funding ecosystem

With increasing requirements of funding criteria for buildings, Germany tries to meet its ambitious climate goals. In this context the consideration of environmental impacts, using a life cycle assessment (LCA), extends the previous focus on CO2-emissions within the operating phase. By introducing a mandatory simplified LCA for all funding applications on new buildings, the authorities aim to achieve a broad implementation of LCA as standard component in the planning process through the established group of energy auditors. Still the energy auditors’ workflows were not adequately represented during the development of the simplified LCA procedures. Resulting practical challenges that arise for this group from their new LCA task are in the focus of this work. The main challenge is how to reduce the effort to gather LCA input data. In addition, methodological improvements based on detailed information, such as that on technical services, are compared against flat-rate aggregates as applied within the current LCA approach. Characteristic parameters used in the standard-based energy balance are analyzed against those on side of LCA. Finally, the influence of the identified aspects regarding the LCA-input data on the LCA-results will be shown in an overview.