Life Cycle Assessment of building stocks across World regions: A systematic literature review of existing studies and prevalent approaches

The building sector has a major role in generating impacts and thus is of increasing interest in policy development. The awareness of LCA-based environmental impacts of existing building stocks (benchmarks) and of future scenarios (targets) related to policy improvement can support policy makers. The paper deals with a systematic review of scientific literature - from 2015 to 2024 - on LCA studies of building stocks, related to multiple real buildings or archetypes, with particular attention to studies that outline future scenarios of strategies to reduce impacts. Among the initial set of 519 papers, 39 articles have been selected for data extraction and analysis. The findings show the LCA modelling for building stocks, in terms of clustering approach and archetype variants, life cycle modules, building parts, energy end-uses and environmental impact indicators under study, highlighting the heterogeneity of existing methodologies. Hence, the effort to find prevalent methodological approaches and to investigate similar results among the studies in relation to the building parts, the life cycle stages, the construction periods and the most relevant building typologies. The findings enable the identification of both strengths and limitations of LCA studies of building stocks for orienting EU policy.