Canadian Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner’s Guide

Embodied Carbon is a rapidly evolving field, but thankfully there’s help to ensure you stay up to speed. The National Resource Council (NRC) published the National Whole-building Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner’s Guide: Guidance for Compliance Reporting of Embodied Carbon in Canadian Building Construction. It was released earlier in 2024, with the goal of enabling greater consistency in the methodologies, boundaries and assumptions used in whole building life cycle assessments (wbLCAs) for Part 3 buildings (as defined by National Building Code).

The guide builds on the work of the City of Vancouver’s Embodied Carbon Guideline (version 1.0, October 2023), but offers a national approach to assessing and demonstrating reductions in the embodied carbon of designs for buildings. The guide is intended to provide additional direction in conjunction with NRC’s National Guidelines for Whole-Building Life Cycle Assessment (2022). 

The new guide was released to serve the federal government’s Standard on Embodied Carbon in Construction, and also serve as a reference for other Canadian jurisdictions and organizations enabling streamlined uptake of embodied carbon measures for these organizations. Additionally, it creates an environment for alignment across the country. It also aligns with all ten minimum alignment recommendations from the recently released Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment, as well as over half of those strongly recommended.  

CAGBC was happy to be the first compliance program to direct users to this new NRC wbLCA Practitioner Guide within our Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) – Design Standard v4, and encourages others to adopt it as well. While not required for ZCB-Design v3 projects, users should consider using it for guidance. It can also provide helpful direction for LEED v4/4.1 BD+C projects attempting a wbLCA under Building Life-Cycle Impact Reduction. For example, the guide gives practical information on setting a baseline, establishing defaults, and determining which building elements are mandatory, optional, or excluded within a wbLCA for compliance (through OmniClass^TM Table 21 Level 4).

The guide is available in both English and French, and is now considered final. The version released earlier in May was considered a draft; the final provides a “plain language review” and translation but did not change the publication with regards to technical content.  

CAGBC thanks its Embodied Carbon Technical Advisory Group volunteers for their reviews of the draft guide earlier in 2024.