Buildings and their supply chains are among the most significant drivers of climate change and the deterioration of ecosystem health. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a framework for quantifying environmental impacts, now commonly used for buildings and recently implemented in EU and UK legislation for Whole Life Carbon (WLC) analyses. The regulatory focus on carbon reflects the narrow focus governing the area of sustainability and the difficulty in obtaining reliable and realistic LCA results for impacts beyond carbon (i.e., all remaining impacts of the LCA protocol, such as land use, eutrophication, and water use) that make sense when benchmarked against other studies. This study identifies knowledge gaps by comparing both carbon and beyond-carbon results of case studies obtained through a systematic approach. The innovative aspect of this study is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes the magnitude of environmental impacts in previously published studies. Secondly, it identifies the key challenges in benchmarking that arise from the principle that most impacts beyond carbon are calculated for specific geographical zones.
