Approaches for evaluating integrated sustainability impacts in forest management enable the harmonization of environmental, social, and economic considerations. Here, we present a methodological framework for quantifying and balancing impacts on widely different aspects of sustainability of different future scenarios for forestry in managed forests in Sweden. The method includes indicators for impacts on climate change, biodiversity, and social and economic values. The indicators were normalized to a standardized scale using reference scenarios and target values. The proposed method was applied for three different future scenarios for forestry over a 100-year period in two different counties in southern and northern Sweden, respectively. The results show the importance of evaluating indicator performance in forestry across diverse regions of the country and tailoring assessments of individual forest owners to their specific local conditions. Long-term assessments are also crucial due to the varying impacts of indicators over time. The methodology requires continuous refinement and can be used as a basis for disclosing the environmental performance of a product based on forest raw materials. It also facilitates the assessment of sustainability in alternative future forestry scenarios and is adaptable to other countries with comparable forestry and forest characteristics.

In this study, we propose a conceptual approach to assessing biodiversity impacts in the life-cycle assessments (LCAs) of forest wood production with a focus on Nordic managed forests at the landscape level. As a basis for our methodology, we suggest assessing the proportion of the total land area of productive forest under the control of a forest owner that fulfils certain criteria that can be regarded as having a positive impact on the development of forest biodiversity. A similar assessment of the forest management performed on the surrounding land is used to define a site-specific reference situation. In the context of an attributional LCA, the suggested method for the specification of business-as-usual (BAU) or environmental quality objectives (EQO) baselines encourages forest owners to choose forest management options that increase the proportion of productive forest land with properties that are more favorable to biodiversity over time. We illustrate the BAU baseline approach with two examples in Sweden to calculate the biodiversity impact from wood production for individual forest owners using four biodiversity indicators from the Swedish national Environmental Quality Objectives (EQOS)-'Living Forests'. The approach defined in this study is at this stage only applicable to forestry assessments. Using a BAU baseline approach similar to that used for international climate reporting is a simple but novel approach that makes use of consensuses that have already been drawn and approaches that have already been established.

Existing classification systems linked to the environmental performance of buildings provide limited added value for practitioners. A survey among Swedish construction entrepreneurs showed that there is a real demand for better formulated criteria and clearer guidance. At the same time, critical investigation of requirements based on fixed average values for primary energy factors (such as in the EU Environmental Performance of Buildings Directive) shows that they are insufficient to provide guidance towards environmental sustainability building practices. They fail to take into account a number of methodological issues, including seasonal and hourly variability of energy supply and demand, and the future evolution of energy mixes. This is illustrated in the case of Sweden. The outline of an Open Classification System, currently under development, is then presented. This system focuses on methodological transparency and validity, as well as ease of use for practitioners. It addresses specifically issues where other existing systems were found to be lacking, and its methodology will be assessed to ensure that it provides optimal guidance towards environmentally sustainable practices. The system is based on three criteria: the energy resource index and global warming potential, calculated with attributional and consequential life cycle approaches, and a heat loss factor to assess the building's energy performance independently from the supply side.

This study investigates how Swedish municipalities work to reduce the climate change impact of building construction. It focuses on current practices related to promoting the use of sustainable construction materials and on barriers to environmental requirements in construction, in particular environmental performance requirements based on LCA procedures. Municipalities were surveyed about the existence of municipal policies dealing with environmental issues in construction, the knowledge level about these issues, and the measures and requirements used to promote materials with low climate change impact. The survey was followed by semi-structured interviews about current practices and barriers to environmental requirements in construction. Results show that large municipalities are more likely to have dedicated policies and implement more measures than their smaller counterparts. However, willingness to implement future measures and knowledge of sustainable construction do not vary significantly with municipality population. Efforts are often limited to procurement, municipal construction projects and discussions with stakeholders. When requirements are set, they are almost always based on prescribing a technical solution (e.g. use of timber) rather than assessing environmental performance (e.g. calculating greenhouse gases emissions with a LCA tool). Measures that municipalities can take as public authorities are restricted by the law, which remains ambiguous as to the legality of environmental performance requirements. Legal issues, limited knowledge and resources appear to be the main barriers to environmental performance requirements in construction. A strategy is proposed to o​v​e​r​

The construction sector faces the challenge of mitigating climate change with urgency. Life cycle assessment(LCA), a widely used tool to assess the climate impacts of buildings, is seldom used for bridges. Materialspecificphenomena such as concrete carbonation and biogenic carbon storage are usually unaccountedfor when assessing the climate impacts from infrastructure. The purpose of this article is to explore theeffects these phenomena could have on climate impact assessment of road bridges and comparisonsbetween bridge designs. For this, a case study is used of two functionally equivalent design alternativesfor a small road bridge in Sweden. Dynamic LCA is used to calculate the effects of biogenic carbon storage,while the Lagerblad method and literature values are used to estimate concrete carbonation. The resultsshow that the climate impact of the bridge is influenced by both phenomena, and that the gap betweenthe impacts from both designs increases if the phenomena are accounted for. The outcome is influencedby the time occurrence assumed for the forest carbon uptake and the end-of-life scenario for the concrete.An equilibrium or 50/50 approach for accounting for the forest carbon uptake is proposed as a middlevalue compromise to handle this issue.

The revised EU Waste Framework Directive (WFD) includes a 70 % target for recovery of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. In order to study the potential change in the resource management of the main C&D waste fractions, as a consequence of fulfilling the WFD target, a Nordic project (ENCORT-CDW) has been performed. Waste fractions studied included asphalt, concrete, bricks, track ballast, gypsum-based construction materials and wood. Recovery scenarios were identified and estimations were made regarding expected savings of primary materials, impact on transport, and pollution and emissions. For wood waste, the main differences between re-use, material recycling and energy recovery were evaluated in a carbon footprint screening based on life cycle assessment methodology. The study concluded that the EU recovery target does not ensure a resource efficient and environmentally sustainable waste recovery in its present form since: It is very sensitive to how the legal definitions of waste and recovery are interpreted in the Member States. This means that certain construction material cycles might not count in the implementation reports while other, less efficient and environmentally safe, recovery processes of the same material will count. It is weight-based and consequently favours large and heavy waste streams. The result is that smaller flows with equal or larger resource efficiency and environmental benefit will be insignificant for reaching the target. It does not distinguish between the various recovery processes, meaning that resource efficient and environmentally safe recovery cannot be given priority. Improved knowledge on C&D waste generation and handling, as well as on content and emissions of dangerous substances, is required to achieve a sustainable recovery.

Whenever Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used to assess the climate impact of buildings, those with high content of biobased materials result with the lowest impact. Traditional approaches to LCA fail to capture aspects such as biogenic carbon exchanges, their timing and the effects from carbon storage. This paper explores a prospective increase of biobased materials in Swedish buildings, using traditional and dynamic LCA to assess the climate impact effects of this increase. Three alternative designs are analysed; one without biobased material content, a CLT building and an alternative timber design with “increased bio”. Different scenario setups explore the sensitivity to key assumptions such as the building's service life, end-of-life scenario, setting of forest sequestration before (growth) or after (regrowth) harvesting and time horizon of the dynamic LCA. Results show that increasing the biobased material content in a building reduces its climate impact when biogenic sequestration and emissions are accounted for using traditional or dynamic LCA in all the scenarios explored. The extent of these reductions is significantly sensitive to the end-of-life scenario assumed, the timing of the forest growth or regrowth and the time horizon of the integrated global warming impact in a dynamic LCA. A time horizon longer than one hundred years is necessary if biogenic flows from forest carbon sequestration and the building's life cycle are accounted for. Further climate impact reductions can be obtained by keeping the biogenic carbon dioxide stored after end-of-life or by extending the building's service life, but the time horizon and impact allocation among different life cycles must be properly addressed.

Conventional phase diagrams plot differences in properties (e.g. volume) of a medium generated by changes in external conditions (e.g. temperature and/or pressure). This paper discusses how the logic of such diagrams can be applied to produce a new type of surface plot, material phase transition (MPT) diagrams, that chart not the conditions for chemical equilibrium but the relative benefits of a particular material system given a set of predefined objectives and a virtual search space of design solutions. Such diagrams can form an integral part of parametric design processes that use ‘auxiliary loads’ (e.g. LCA values) as variables to generate design iterations. A Grasshopper user object is created and used to design a box beam that yields a set of auxiliary loads charts and MPT diagrams. The anatomy of MPT diagrams is described, and areas for future studies discussed.

This quantitative/qualitative evaluation of meta-heuristic design processes being implemented in a real-life architecture project introduces the theoretical concept of anticipatory adaptive assemblages (AAA) and reports on tactics that were used to reduce the ‘curse of dimensionality’ associated with the mechanisms that produce such assemblages. It describes strategies to adopt ‘presilient’ methods to constrain a model’s design space before any evolutionary solving occurs, leverage the advantage in fenestration performance presumed to arise from explorations of non-periodic tessellations of the plane, and use benchmark models to optimise some material aspects of wall sections. These tactics all support a materiality-based approach to designing architecture using genetic algorithms. The experiments were designed in an attempt to begin to close the knowledge gap between on the one hand the existing praxis of LCA-based analyses, on the other simulations that use material properties to directly inform geometries associated with particular combinations of (for instance) site, weather, and material data. The hypothesis is that AAA’s can become an effective framework for design-based adaptation to site conditions and mitigation of climate change. The objectives of the study are a) to implicitly and qualitatively describe the trials and tribulations a commercial adaptation of alternative design processes may cause, while b) explicitly and quantitatively report on the results of the experiments, and how they relate to AAAs. After an introduction of the AAA concept, three design experiments are described and their outcomes analysed, followed by a concluding discussion including suggestions for future studies.