OmrådeLCA, assessment of area development: Case study of the Zero-Emission Neighbourhood Ydalir

The built environment is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There is a growing need to quantifying GHG emissions, and LCA tools can be used to help address them and find the key contributors. In order to compare different solutions of development of the built environment in the early stage planning process, the OmrådeLCA tool has been developed. OmrådeLCA has the unique advantage, compared to other similar tools, of using the system expansion approach, which allows for comparing different scenarios based on the same functional unit. We applied OmrådeLCA on Ydalir (Norway), a zero emission neighbourhood in an early stage planning process. The results show how significant the share of emissions from transportation are, contributing to more than 60 % to the total GHG emissions. Sensitivity analysis shows that choices made, and data used in modelling transportation significantly impact resulting GHG emissions. Thus, conducting a thorough analysis of factors affecting transportation is important for obtaining representative results when using OmrådeLCA. The results from the assessment of Ydalir with OmrådeLCA have been compared with results from the same case assessed with a tool developed by NTNU. The comparison shows relatively small differences in calculated results. This small degree of variation between the two tools in calculated results, demonstrates that OmrådeLCA can provide good estimates even at an early stage. This gives the tool great utility value because it is in the early stages of a project major actions can be performed and decisions made that will affect the emissions the most. (paper)