Forest dynamics in LCA: Integrating carbon fluxes from forest management systems into the life cycle assessment of a building

The urgent issue of climate change has sparked increasing interest in using wood to reduce buildings' greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe). While attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are commonly employed to estimate GHGe from buildings, they lack a temporal distribution of carbon fluxes from biogenic materials, overlooking forest management impacts on emissions and sequestration. Consequently, we investigated the integration of forest and building systems, examining emissions associated with three different forest management scenarios at stand and landscape levels. Our findings suggest a 6 % to 81 % lower GHGe for the building using this study's approach compared to the static methodology recommended by the European Standard EN16485 in a 50 year perspective. However, the accumulated impact over the building's lifetime remains similar. Hence, both methods incentivize building designers’ to use wood to lower GHGe, although the dynamic integration postpones benefits from the forests' carbon sequestration to later stages of the building's lifetime.