Urban LCA

EFFEKT and Artelia, in collaboration with Frederiksberg Kommune, have developed Urban LCA – a groundbreaking tool for life cycle assessment in urban development, designed to continuously measure and improve design strategies and solutions in the early planning phases.

While Building LCA has been widely researched and applied to assess the climate impact of individual buildings, there remains a significant data gap for urban areas – despite their major influence on CO₂ emissions and biodiversity. Where traditional LCA tools are building-focused and typically applied late in the process, Urban LCA takes a holistic view from the outset. It evaluates the environmental impact of the entire urban fabric – buildings, landscapes, mobility, and utilities – using both carbon emissions and biodiversity loss as key indicators.

With Urban LCA, planners can integrate environmental considerations directly into early decision-making. The tool enables municipalities to align projects with climate and biodiversity goals and embed these targets into tenders, briefs, and planning documents. Developers can test different scenarios based on early square meter projections, using the results to inform both programmatic and business model decisions. In the context of growing regulatory demands such as the EU Taxonomy and CSRD, Urban LCA also supports robust monitoring and compliance on carbon and biodiversity performance throughout a project’s life cycle.

As a scenario-based tool, Urban LCA is designed to be used alongside science-based allocation frameworks such as the Reduction Roadmap, ensuring alignment with the Paris Agreement.

The project is supported by Plan22+, a five-year initiative from the Plan- og Landdistriktsstyrelsen and the philanthropic association Realdania, which aims to strengthen municipalities’ climate work by developing new knowledge and tools for achieving climate goals through physical planning.

The tool, final report, and underlying data are open resources, available here.
If you are interested in using Urban LCA, collaborating, or contributing to its future development, we would love to hear from you.