Digital Life-Cycle Carbon Governance for Climate-Resilient Buildings: Global Evidence and a Singapore National Pathway

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

🔬研究者:This review provides a structured synthesis of digital tools for life-cycle carbon governance and identifies research gaps in embodied carbon management.

🏢実務担当者:Building developers and sustainability teams can use the proposed governance mechanism and Singapore pathway to design MRV systems and EPD-based procurement.

🏛政策担当者:National and city regulators can draw on the five-phase pathway to design policies for whole-life carbon regulation and carbon market integration.

Background: Buildings and construction account for a substantial share of global energy use, carbon dioxide emissions, and material extraction, making both operational and embodied carbon central to climate-resilient building policy. Methods: This article is framed as a critical scoping review with a structured narrative synthesis. It synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, standards, and policy reports published mainly from 2020 to June 2026, while retaining older foundational standards where they define life-cycle boundaries or verification methods. The counted revision documents a reproducible screened search in OpenAlex plus targeted website and standards searching, with Google Scholar retained only for citation chasing and sensitivity checking; reporting is aligned to PRISMA-ScR and PRISMA-S principles. Results: The evidence shows that operational carbon reduction remains the most immediately measurable pathway through HVAC optimization, envelope improvement, smart energy management systems, and digital measurement, reporting, and verification. However, embodied carbon management through Environmental Product Declarations, material passports, low-carbon procurement, prefabrication, and circularity is necessary to avoid shifting emissions from operation to construction. Contribution: The review develops a four-layer digital life-cycle carbon governance mechanism linking life-cycle boundary setting, data capture, verification and assurance, and policy-market conversion. Singapore pathway: Singapore’s five-phase pathway is repositioned as an operational carbon MRV entry point that must be expanded to whole-life carbon through embodied carbon datasets, EPD-based procurement, and ASEAN-specific localization. The revised pathway identifies implementation risks, including data governance, additionality, double-counting, auditor capacity, SME access, market liquidity, and cross-country transferability. Conclusions: Digital MRV and carbon-market mechanisms can accelerate building decarbonization only when they are coupled with whole-life carbon boundaries, embodied carbon safeguards, transparent review methods, and context-specific financing.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16142725first seen 2026-07-13 06:21:20
• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16142725first seen 2026-07-13 07:19:21