International Industrial Ecology Day 2021
Residential building LCAs from the developing world: How much do we know?
Abstract
The United Nations classifies 123 countries in the world as “developing”. These countries house more than 80% of the world’s population. Globally, the residential sector is responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 30% of GHG emissions, with much higher percentages in developing regions. These regions are also different in that almost 1 billion people reside in slums. Understanding residential buildings in developing countries is key to identifying GHG mitigation strategies and combatting climate change.Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool routinely used to estimate different types of impacts from a product’s lifetime. Currently, the vast majority of residential building LCAs and review studies focus on developed regions. Less than 25% of the reviews look beyond China and India from the developing world. The purpose of this study is to review residential building LCA literature from all developing countries, and identify common characteristics, norms, and gaps in data and literature. We collected around 100 relevant studies and classified them by their LCA scope, data sources, reproducibility and major findings. We found that while the building geometry always comes from local empirical data, other embodied energy data often come from a mix of local and international sources. Use-phase cooling behavior of residents is often taken from local observations, and could be a useful data source for global studies. We identified common, critical data gaps for most countries, but found that important data could be retrieved from related fields for some. India, Brazil and China were found to have the most relevant studies, with the highest reproducibility. 3 broad typologies of buildings- formal, semi-formal or low-quality formal, and informal were identified.
Our review summarizes residential building data and characteristics, and analyzes LCA studies and results from developing countries. It also details data gaps and potential areas for future research.
Author(s)
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Aishwarya Iyer | Yale University |
| Narasimha Rao | Yale University |
| Edgar Hertwich | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology |