Benchmark of ecodesign LCA tools at neighborhood scale
Benchmark des outils d'écoconception ACV à l'échelle du quartier
Résumé
Background
There is an urgent need to decrease humanity's environmental impacts. Cities have an important role to play considering the continuous increase in urban population at both global and urban scale (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, et Population Division 2019). Ecodesign tools for urban projects are essential to quantify and thus minimize cities environmental impacts but are still too scarcely used at the district scale (Brozovsky, Gustavsen, et Gaitani 2021). The fast development of digital models labeled as BIM (Building Information Model), CIM (City Information Model) or even BIM+ (Deprêtre, Jacquinod, and Mielniczek 2022) could foster the use, precision and reliability of existing ecodesign tools at the urban scale. It could also ease the use and development of new LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) methodologies such as consequential, dynamic and prospective LCA that currently comes at a high cost in terms of data needs (Anand et Amor 2017).
Purpose
We propose this benchmark of eco-design tools for district LCA being able to use geospatial data. We focus on LCA tools since LCA is recognized as the most relevant method to evaluate environmental impacts. The objective of the benchmark is to list existing LCA tools adapted to early-design of urban projects and explore their efficiency and limits as far as district LCA is concerned. We focus on early-design stages where decisions have the most influence on environmental impacts (Kaushal et al. 2022).
A district is always a unique, multifunctional system that is highly integrated with its environment. Consequently, LCA studies need to take into account precisely the situational context, including local climatic conditions, irradiation of the plot, roads and various networks, infrastructures, transport etc. (Peuportier et al. 2017). We thus focus on tools that allow for the use of geospatial data from BIM or CIM to account for those key aspects.
Methods
We first establish a list of LCA tools enabling the use of needed databases for district LCA. We then further our enquiry by making a literature review on the coupling of BIM and CIM with LCA, listing mentioned tools.
Then, a critical analysis of this list is performed according to several criteria:
●published case study using the tool,
●use of geodata,
●methodology,
●tools conditions of use (open source or not, free or not).
Results
We identified 73 LCA ecodesign tools. Only 7 have the ability to carry out LCA at the district scale, and 4 can integrate geospatial information.
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