Integration of Risk Assessment in Life Cycle Analyses for Sustainable and Resilient Built Environment: A Review

Under the rapidly growing threat of climate change, ensuring climate resilience for the built environment while promoting sustainable design practices is necessary. In the field of sustainability, Life Cycle Analyses and Risk Assessment can be complementary tools for providing a broader set of information to stakeholders and increasing awareness about construction quality. Proactive measures can also be promoted with the help of resilience analyses. This work presents a literature review to understand the development status of methodologies evaluating the sustainability and resilience of buildings and construction works. In particular, a review of research works that carry out resilience assessment along with risk-integrated life cycle analysis is carried out. The main explored issues are used tools for life cycle analyses and their applicability based on considered measures. Research outcomes showed that the integration of resilience in sustainability assessment is provided in a handful number of research works. Among them, only a few exploit life cycle analyses with nondetermining approaches. The identified works focus on environmental and economic impacts. Despite evaluating some social metrics, works dealing with a comprehensive S-LCA have yet to be found. Lastly, most works evaluate the effects of hazardous events, by considering repair measures solely. This means that the restoration of the initial technical performance is foreseen after a repair. Performance enhancements, which can be provided through refurbishment measures, are still to be addressed. This represents a significant applicability shortcoming. In the next years, stakeholders will be called to plan measures aimed at adjusting the built environment in a changing environment. Therefore, a wider spectrum of measures is necessary, which also includes novel design practices with different minimal technical requirements. This will also provide feedback to policymakers, who might be asked to revise and adjust design codes.