In Sweden, more than half of the building stock's greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe) are linked to the maintenance, renovation and rebuilding of the existing stock. While life-cycle based climate regulations have focused on new-build so far, this suggests the urge to address embodied GHGe related to existing buildings. Research on life cycle assessment on building renovations' GHGe have so far mainly focused on the trade-offs between operational and embodied GHG. However, the nature of contemporary renovation practices and associated embodied GHGe remains largely unresearched. This study aims at building knowledge on Swedish building renovation projects as to identify drivers and parameters of influence on associated embodied GHG and resource consumption, and to define benchmark values. Bill-of-materials and complementary project specific parameters, e.g. geometry data materials, were collected from public and private developers of 30 recent Swedish renovation projects. To complete the datasets, qualitative data was collected consulting public and private property owner and developer representatives. The data was processed using Swedish generic environmental data and used to perform embodied GHGe assessments at both the renovation project scale and the renovation measure scale. Results show the complexity and variety of the nature of renovation projects and of associated embodied GHGe. Results explore the definition of GHGe benchmarks and novel metrics to characterize renovation measures and renovation projects. This leads to provide useful knowledge regarding mitigation strategies and the potential introduction of life cycle-based regulations for renovation projects.