Life-Cycle Assessment as a decision-support tool for early phases of urban planning: evaluating applicability through a comparative approach

SUSTAINABLE BUILT ENVIRONMENT D-A-CH CONFERENCE 2019

生态环境科学

Slavkovic, K.^1 ; Nault, E.^1 ; Jusselme, T.^1 ; Andersen, M.^1^2

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Fribourg, Switzerland^1

Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland^2

关键词: Comparative approach;    Decision making process;    Decision support tools;    Environmental objectives;    Environmental performance;    Life Cycle Assessment (LCA);    Project development;    Research and development projects;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/323/1/012030/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/323/1/012030

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

While ambitious environmental objectives are being set for new constructions in Switzerland, the assessment of urban-scale projects and comparison of their performance to national targets are made possible by a growing number of life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools. However, previous research emphasizes the lack of existing tools to support the decision-making process at the early design stage, characterized by a low level of project details. This paper presents a comparison between three LCA tools. The first, stemming from a research and development project (SETUP), is an exploration tool relying on a database of urban-level scenarios and their environmental performance, able to convert district targets (e.g. 2000-Watt society objectives) into specific sub-targets at the building or component levels. The other two are online LCA tools currently available to practitioners (Sméo and Calculation tool for 2000-Watt-society-sites RH II ), that allow assessing the project and verifying its compliance with a given target. Each tool was applied to a low-carbon case study, the blueFactory district in Fribourg (Switzerland), in two hypothetical contexts corresponding to the schematic and detailed project development phases, characterized by different levels of details. When used for the assessment of a project at a more advanced development stage with a high resolution of detail, findings indicate that Smeo and RH II provide similar environmental performance results. However, in early planning stages, SETUP shows better abilities to support decision-making by providing ranges of results and highlighting uncertainties and the influence of design parameters that have not yet been fixed.