Life cycle environmental benchmarks for residential buildings in Belgium

So far the efforts to reduce buildings’ environmental impacts have focused mainly on limiting and decarbonising the operational energy consumed during building use. The next challenge is to also reduce the environmental impacts related to construction product manufacturing and assembly, i.e. embodied impacts. To compute buildings’ embodied impacts, in Belgium, a national LCA method and database were developed. However, there currently exist no benchmark values to compare the environmental performance of a proposed project. Therefore, the aim of this research is to define environmental benchmarks for residential buildings in Belgium. To define these a hybrid approach (i.e. top-down and bottom-up) is applied. This allows definition of long term target values based on environmental goals and policy targets (top-down), and to investigate their practical feasibility based on a statistical analysis of the building stock (bottom-up). The benchmarks are an essential tool for policy makers to define environmental targets, and as a reference for building stakeholders to encourage them in making more environmentally conscious decisions.