Recommendations for a Common Nordic LCA-Approach

NEW REPORT: Recommendations for a Common Nordic Approach to Combat New Buildings Life Cycle Climate Impact

Publiceret 17-06-2024
News WP1

A new report highlights the potential in a common Nordic way to report the climate impact for a building and its full life cycle. This pioneered approach could serve as basis for a common Nordic construction legislation, where the calculation rules and scenario settings are the same, constituting a common reporting accounting of all life cycle stages. The experts in the report recommends, that the common reporting may be reused by an individual country that may add additional requirements such as limit values for the construction stage.

NEW REPORT: Recommendations for a Common Nordic Approach to Combat New Buildings Life Cycle Climate Impact

Mandatory Life-Cycle GWP Declarations for New Buildings in the EU and Nordic Countries

Nordic countries are frontrunners and climate declaration for new buildings has either been implemented or is in the planning to be legally required. It is also becoming mandatory within the European Union to declare the buildings life-cycle GWP (global warming potential) result, based on the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD, EU/2024/1275). This climate declaration will be required for all new buildings in 2030 (and 2028 for public buildings) and based on life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology defined in global and European standards.

Paving the way for European development, the report describes calculation rules, scenario settings and generic data, emphasising the importance of standardising data and calculation methods to achieve comparable results. Furthermore, a cost effective, tiered approach is presented, where typically a European common approach can be used, and only where significantly contributing to the GWP a Nordic or national specification should be established.

Martin Erlandsson

We have noticed that if the underlying data used to calculate the GWP indicator result is given for a European level, and not only as a single indicator result, it can easily be adopted for any national condition. We call this parametrized scenario and this also supports transparency on how a GWP indicator is actually calculated.

 

Martin Erlandsson, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute.

Future Scenarios and Sustainability in Building Projects

Such scenario settings have been developed for several information modules and described in detail in the project report. The future scenario applied in general is based on data valid for the current situation but transformed to reflect the future development the next 50 years.

The report also addresses topics such as the inclusion of vegetation on building plots, assessing GWP for existing buildings, and defining sustainable forests for calculating the contribution to biogenic carbon storage in building products. We are aware that not all these aspects will be part of the final climate declaration, but it is good for research to cover also possible future issues and our findings can already be used in voluntary assessments.

- Janne Pesu, Finnish Environment Institute (Syke)

 

Marie tiainen

The work package is led by Maria Tiainen from the Ministry of Environment Finland. Maria envisions that the work done in this and other parallel work packages can be seen as a contribution for the forthcoming EPBD delegated act. This delegated act will likely be launched in December 2025 and include this kind of rules developed and suggested.

Nordic and Estonian collaboration

Recommendations for a common Nordic approach were defined by a Nordic group of experts: IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, Finnish environment Institute (SYKE), Natural resource institute Finland (LUKE), and with the help of a large group of other experts in all Nordic countries and Estonia.