Review of Urban Building Types and Their Energy Use and Carbon Emissions in Life-Cycle Analyses from Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

Urbanization, slum redevelopment, and population growth will lead to unprecedented levels of residential building construction in “low- and middle-income” (LMI) countries in the coming decades. However, less than 50% of previous residential building life-cycle assessment (LCA) reviews included LMI countries. Moreover, all reviews that included LMI countries only considered formal (cement–concrete) buildings, while more than 800 million people in these countries lived in informal settlements. We analyze LCA literature and define three building types based on durability: formal, semiformal, and informal. These exhaustively represent residential buildings in LMI countries. For each type, we define dominant archetypes from across the world, based on construction materials. To address the data deficiency and lack of transparency in LCA studies, we develop a reproducibility metric for building LCAs. We find that the countries with the most reproducible studies are India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Mexico, and Brazil. Only 7 out of 54 African countries have reproducible studies focused on either the embodied or use phase. Maintenance, refurbishment, and end-of-life phases are included in hardly any studies in the LMI LCA literature. Lastly, we highlight the necessity for studying current, traditional buildings to provide a benchmark for future studies focusing on energy and material efficiency strategies.