Insight from Review Articles of Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings

Abstract

The building sector holds a significant position in the global energy consumption share, and its environmental impact continues to intensify, making the construction industry a key player in sustainable development. The application of life cycle assessment on buildings (LCA-B) is widely employed to evaluate building energy and environment performance, and thus is of great significance for ensuring the sustainability of the project. This work aims to provide a systematic overview of LCA-B development based on reviewed literature. A three-stage mixed research method is adopted in this study: Firstly, an overall analysis framework is constructed, and 327 papers related to building life cycle assessment published between 2009 and 2025 are screened out by using the bibliometric method; Then, through scientometrics analysis, the journal regions, sources, scholars, and keyword evolution are revealed and analyzed using VOSviewer tool, and the hotspots in the field of LCA-B (e.g., integration of building information modeling (BIM) in LCA-B, multi-dimensional framework of environment–society–culture) are preliminarily explored based on the selected highly cited papers. The research finds that: (1) the performance of low energy buildings is better than that of net zero energy buildings from the perspective of LCA; (2) software compatibility and data exchange are the main obstacles in the integration of BIM-LCA; (3) a multi-dimensional LCA framework covering the social or cultural aspects is expected for a comprehensive assessment of building performance. This study provides a systematic analysis and elaboration of review articles related to LCA-B and thereby provides researchers with in-depth insight into this field.