Whole Life Carbon Assessment of Residential Building Renovation

This report presents a method for assessing the whole-life carbon impacts of residential building renovation during early design. It combines building performance simulation with life cycle assessment to compare an unrenovated reference building with six retrofit scenarios. Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses examine how material quantities, service lives, climate change, and electricity grid decarbonization affect the results. In the modeled case, a low-energy renovation using biobased materials has the lowest whole-life emissions and an environmental payback period of three years. The findings show why retrofit choices should be evaluated across both embodied and operational emissions.