Efforts to make buildings greener tend to focus on energy efficiency, but considerable ‘hidden’ carbon emissions also come from the materials and construction process. From 2030, all new buildings in the EU will need to be assessed for their global warming potential across their whole lifespan, from materials to demolition. The INDICATE LIFE project is helping the building sector and policymakers prepare for this challenge.
Under the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, adopted in 2024, energy performance certificates will need to disclose the life-cycle global warming potential for new buildings over 1 000 m² from January 2028. This equirement will apply to all new buildings from 2030. But making those assessments and gathering the data in a reliable and comparable way is currently difficult. And this is where INDICATE LIFE comes in.
‘The EU building sector accounts for 40% of energy use and around 40% of carbon emissions when the full building lifecycle is considered,’ says Sarah de Linde Agerskov, administrative project manager of INDICATE at Smith Innovation, a sustainability consultancy company based in Copenhagen, Denmark. ‘INDICATE LIFE addresses the urgent need for reliable data, methods and policies to regulate whole-life carbon emissions.
‘By combining building data with market and policy insights, the project supports science-based decarbonisation pathways and the integration of whole-life carbon requirements into national policy frameworks.’
The whole-life carbon approach looks at greenhouse gas emissions that come from both operation of the building during its use but also ‘embodied carbon’, which is released during the production of materials, transport, assembly, maintenance and final demolition of a building.
The INDICATE LIFE project brings together a consortium of 24 organisations from across Europe and builds on an earlier LIFE project, which ran from 2022 to 2024. INDICATE PILOT project supported the use of life cycle assessment data to assess 50 case study buildings in Ireland, the Czech Republic and Spain. The INDICATE LIFE project is now expanding the whole-life carbon approach for buildings to Austria, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg and eventually Hungary. While the project team is still developing national benchmarks for whole-life carbon assessments in the countries involved, it has conducted cost-benefit analysis of the approach.
‘The project's cost-benefit evidence base covers 41 case studies across the national projects,’ says de Linde Agerskov. ‘It shows that conducting a building LCA costs approximately 0.1–2% of total project costs.’ Most of those costs come from data collection and immature workflows rather than the calculation, she says.
‘Case evidence does not support the assumption that low-carbon buildings systematically cost more,’ adds de Linde Agerskov. ‘Savings were associated with early design optimisation, reduced material quantities, reuse and prefabrication. Load-bearing structures, foundations and floor systems are the consistent carbon hotspots, and the largest opportunities arise before major design decisions are fixed.’
The INDICATE LIFE project supports the revised EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the delegated regulation for the national calculation of life-cycle global warming potential.
- Publication date
- 29 September 2026
- Author
- European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency
