Decarbonization in green building rating systems: A systematic review on embodied and operational carbon credits.

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This study offers a novel systematic mapping of carbon credits across GBRS, providing a foundation for further research on LCA integration in certification systems.

🏢実務担当者:Construction and real estate professionals can use these findings to select or develop GBRS that better address embodied carbon, improving building sustainability and compliance with emerging regulations.

🏛政策担当者:Regulators can leverage this review to align GBRS with national decarbonization targets and ensure that certification systems promote comprehensive carbon accounting.

The construction industry is a major contributor to global carbon emissions. Although Green Building Rating Systems (GBRS) are widely used to promote sustainability, their treatment of whole-life carbon remains uneven, with operational carbon generally receiving greater emphasis than embodied carbon associated with material production, transportation, and end-of-life stages. While life cycle assessment (LCA) is well established at the building-project level, its incorporation within GBRS remains fragmented. Existing GBRS literature primarily compares high-level sustainability categories and does not systematically map carbon-related credits to life-cycle stages or examine differences in LCA boundary definitions, governance structures, and verification mechanisms across systems. This study is the first to conduct a standardized life-cycle carbon mapping of carbon-related criteria across major GBRS and to evaluate their capacity to function as whole-life carbon accounting and governance frameworks for both embodied and operational emissions. In addition, this review explicitly reports the relative weighting of embodied versus operational carbon across GBRS, highlighting that most systems strongly prioritize operational carbon, while embodied carbon remains underrepresented, and that DGNB is the only system allocating more than 50% of its carbon-related credits to embodied emissions, alongside key inter-system differences in boundary coverage, Environmental Product Declaration use, and governance maturity. Based on these findings, the study outlines pathways to strengthen GBRS by integrating cradle-to-site LCA, improving material transparency, and supporting low-carbon design and construction strategies across the building life cycle. Overall, this review provides evidence-based insights to support the integration of embodied and operational carbon within GBRS and to enhance their role in advancing whole-life decarbonization of the built environment.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2026.128757first seen 2026-06-29 06:28:07