Martin Röck

• PhD Engineering Science (KU Leuven) - DOC Fellow (OeAW) - Civil Engineering (ETH Zurich) - MSc BSc Architecture (TU Graz) - Building Systems Engineering (HTL VB)
• Research Associate at KU Leuven

Buildings are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and contributors to the climate crisis. To meet climate-change mitigation needs, one must go beyond operational energy consumption and related GHG emissions of buildings and address their full life cycle. This study investigates the global trends of GHG emissions arising across the life...

Various environmental challenges, particularly the rising severity of the impacts of climate change, require a systematic shift in and decarbonization of the global economy. Due to their high environmental impacts, buildings and construction have a special role in decarbonization. Environmental modelling of building stock dynamics can help policy m...

As the European Union (EU) is aiming to realize climate neutrality by 2050, there is a need to investigate greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction and carbon dioxide removal strategies (CRRS) from a life cycle perspective. Existing literature lacks harmonization of building-related strategies considering the whole-life cycle of buildings and the interlinkag...

The building sector plays an important role in achieving the climate objectives of the EU Green Deal. While prioritizing measures to reduce operational energy and GHG emissions has proven beneficial, it has shifted burdens by increasing embodied emissions. Quantifying and regulating emissions throughout the entire building life cycle is therefore c...

Wood and bio-based construction products are perceived as a way to use renewable resources, to save energy and to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG)-emissions during production and to store carbon during the entire service life of the building. This article compares the carbon footprint per kilogram of wood products (softwood beams, plywood, oriented st...

The European Union (EU) aims at climate-neutrality by 2050, necessitating a transformation of the entire economy, including the construction and buildings sectors. This study, initiated by the European Commission’s DG ENV, provides a basis for a roadmap to mitigate building-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a life cycle perspective. This...

Currently, there is an urgent need to implement whole life carbon emissions reduction measures in Mediterranean regions. In the Spanish context, although there are several initiatives there is no national harmonised LCA method or national database of construction products with associated environmental data. This paper presents a summary of the meth...

Building construction and operation are responsible for around 40 % of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. To identify emissions reduction and removal potentials as well as wider environmental impacts, researchers, policy, and decision makers need comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) insights on individual buildings...

Building construction and operations are pivotal in climate mitigation efforts. While emissions from building operations can be easily reduced through renewable energy adoption and improved energy efficiency, the so-called ‘embodied’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, also called ‘embodied carbon’, associated with building material production and proc...

Following the Paris Agreement, many countries such as Switzerland or Denmark have derived carbon budgets for their national building stock to support local policies by creating benchmarks. The aim is to calculate a quota for carbon emissions that a country can spend on its building stock by 2050 to ensure that it stays within a 1.5°C trajectory. Th...

Responsible for 37% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the construction and operation of buildings involves substantial potential to mitigate climate change. Although they represent only a small part of the building stock, publicly-owned buildings can lead by example and stimulate emission reductions through public procurement processes that...

Globally, interest in understanding the life cycle related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of buildings is increasing. Robust data is required for benchmarking and analysis of parameters driving resource use and whole life carbon (WLC) emissions. However, open datasets combining information on energy and material use as well as whole life carbon emi...

In order to achieve the necessary reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and decarbonization of building construction and operation, both high- and low-tech building design strategies are promoted. Amongst particularly promising strategies are the deployment of energy efficiency measures, for reducing operational energy use and related impacts...

The building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied to buildings requires collecting and organizing large quantities of data over all building life cycles. To overcome specific difficulties related to the system boundaries definition and life cycle inventory stages, the literature recognizes that systematic building decomposition methods (SBDM) can be...

The focus in reducing environmental impacts of buildings is shifting from the operational stage to the full life cycle, with particular attention to embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of construction materials. The application of bio-based construction materials is promoted for potentially reducing material-related embodied GHG and even enabli...

Wood and other bio-based building materials are often perceived as a good choice from a climate mitigation perspective. This article compares the life cycle assessment of the same multi-residential building from the perspective of 16 countries participating in the international project Annex 72 of the International Energy Agency to determine the ef...

The focus in reducing environmental impacts of buildings is shifting from the operational stage to the full life cycle, with particular attention to embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of construction materials. The application of bio-based construction materials is promoted for potentially reducing material-related embodied GHG and even enabli...

In order to achieve the necessary reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and decarbonization of building construction and operation, both high- and low-tech building design strategies are promoted. Amongst particularly promising strategies are the deployment of energy efficiency measures, for reducing operational energy use and related impacts...

“Limiting global temperature increase needs demand-side actions and lifestyle changes", stated the IPCC in their Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5. Building construction and operation are key to solving the climate and ecological crises and central for enabling sustainable development. To enable the sustainable transformation of the built env...

Decarbonizing the construction and operation of buildings is essential in achieving sustainable development and mitigating the climate and ecosystem crisis. While considerable progress has been made to reduce energy and emissions from building operation, from a whole life cycle perspective, current building practices still struggle to provide housi...

Buildings’ construction and operation are major contributors to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the substantial reduction of GHG emissions across their full life cycle is required to enable meeting international climate targets. For effective climate change mitigation - as recent studies have shown - a special focus has to be put on lowe...

“Limiting global temperature increase needs demand-side actions and lifestyle changes”, stated the IPCC in their Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5. Social innovation in the form of alternative models for spatial production and ownership can support such regenerative lifestyles and emission reductions in the emissions-heavy building sector. Ho...

Construction and operation of buildings are responsible for 37% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In contrast, the Austria’s National Inventory Report attributes a mere 10% of national emissions to buildings – including only direct operational emissions of residential and service sector buildings. This narrow definition of the buildings sec...

Insulation materials represent the first and most important improvement measure when refurbishing residential buildings. Materials, however, differ on a wide set of criteria (e.g. functional, environmental, economic). It remains difficult to find trade-offs between these criteria in collective decision-making processes about the choice of renovatio...

Buildings constructed today need to be nearly-zero energy/emission buildings (nZEB) during operation. Amongst strategies to meet today's nZEB performance requirements are passive building concepts. However, it is unclear to which degree such concepts aid buildings to achieve net-zero carbon targets. To address this research gap, we conduct a life c...

"What does it look like when people design living spaces together? As part of the Styrian Summer of Architecture 2018, wohnlabor organized a week long public workshop on the topic of collaborative housing. Our first publication "gemeinsam wohnen gestalten" (designing housing together) documents the results and events of this workshop. In addition,...

The global challenge of large-scale climate change mitigation requires action also in the building and construction sector. From a life cycle perspective, and considering the mitigation timeframe, the issue of reducing embodied GHG emissions is gaining attention. Effective ways to reduce embodied GHG emissions have been proposed by the use of fast-...

The global challenge of large-scale climate change mitigation requires action also in the building and construction sector. From a life cycle perspective, and considering the mitigation timeframe, the issue of reducing embodied GHG emissions is gaining attention. Effective ways to reduce embodied GHG emissions have been proposed by the use of fast-...

Various environmental challenges, particularly the rising severity of the impacts of climate change, require a systematic shift in and decarbonization of the global economy. Due to their high environmental impacts, buildings and construction have a special role in decarbonization. Environmental modelling of building stock dynamics can help policy m...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used for decision-making in the design process of buildings and neighbourhoods. Therefore, visualisation of LCA results to support interpretation and decision-making becomes more important. The number of building LCA tools and the published literature has increased substantially in recent years. Most of t...

Improving the environmental life cycle performance of buildings by focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions along the building life cycle is considered a crucial step in achieving global climate targets. This paper provides a systematic review and analysis of 75 residential case studies in humid subtropical and tropical climates....

Introduction: The international research project IEA EBC Annex 72 investigates the life cycle related environmental impacts caused by buildings. The project aims inter alia to harmonise LCA approaches on buildings. Methods: To identify major commonalities and discrepancies among national LCA approaches, reference buildings were defined to present a...

Design practitioners' knowledge about Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is crucial for the necessary decarbonisation of the built environment as well as the mitigation of other negative environmental impacts. Designers' attitudes towards LCA have so far been rarely analysed. In 2019, as part of the project IEA EBC Annex 72 "Assessing life cycle related e...

In the face of the unfolding climate crisis, the role and importance of reducing Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the building sector is increasing. This study investigates the global trends of GHG emissions occurring across the life cycle of buildings by systematically compiling life cycle assessment (LCA) studies and analysing more than 650 bu...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) procedures are usually employed during the different building design phases. The first one is mainly related to the environment protection, while the second to the costs control and optimization. This paper aims to define a procedure to “translate” LCA results into an economic evaluation, typ...

To avoid uncontrollable and uncompensated effects of climate change, within the ratification of the Paris Agreement, 197 countries including Austria have committed to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases to hold the warming below 2°C. Achievement of this objective will oblige Austrian society to stay within a carbon budget of 1000 Mt CO2eq unt...

To foster sustainable development in construction sectors, environmental impacts need to be reduced dramatically. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique is the most firmly established methodology used to quantify these environmental impacts and, therefore, has been applied with increasing frequency to assess the environmental performance of buil...

The application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique to a building requires the collection and organization of a large amount of data over its life cycle. The systematic decomposition method can be used to classify building components, elements and materials, overcome specific difficulties that are encountered when attempting to complete th...

Target values for creating carbon budgets for buildings are important for developing climate-neutral building stocks. A lack of clarity currently exists for defining carbon budgets for buildings and what constitutes a unit of assessment—particularly the distinction between production- and consumption-based accounting. These different perspectives o...

To foster sustainable development, the environmental impacts of the construction sector need to be reduced substantially. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the established methodology for the quantification of environmental impacts, and therefore has been increasingly applied to assess the environmental performance of buildings. By coupling LCAs with...

Purpose The 71st LCA forum was held on 18 June 2019 in Zurich, Switzerland, to discuss the current status and future plans of environmental benchmarking for buildings in view of the 1.5 °C target stipulated in the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement requires a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, in fact net zero by 2050. One of the...

The IEA EBC Annex 72 focuses on the assessment of the primary energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts of buildings during production, construction, use (including repair and replacement) and end of life (dismantling), i.e. during the entire life cycle of buildings. In one of its activities, reference buildings (size, mater...

The building permit is an indispensable connection between the approval authority and the executive client within the construction process. Moreover, sustainability criteria do not have sufficient regard in the building permit process in the area of research. To lay the foundation for a state-of-the-art digitalization of the building permit process...

In recent years the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for assessing and improving the environmental performance of buildings has increased. At the same time, the automated optimization of building designs is gaining attraction for both design and research purposes. In this regard, a number of issues persist when aiming to optimize building...

The aim of the PEF4Buildings project, commissioned by the European Commission, was to assess if the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method and related guidance documents developed in the framework of the Environmental Footprint pilot test phase are applicable at the building level. The project has been coordinated by VITO with TU Graz and KU...

Globally, the building sector is responsible for more than 40% of energy use and it contributes approximately 30% of the global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. This high contribution stimulates research and policies to reduce the operational energy use and related GHG emissions of buildings. However, the environmental impacts of buildings can exten...

The PEF4Buildings project is commissioned by the European Commission and is carried out by the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), KU Leuven and TU Graz. The aim of the project is to test the applicability of the PEF method Guide (Commission Recommendation 179/2013 on The use of common methods to measure and communicate the life cy...

The importance of evaluation and improvement of life cycle performance of buildings in early design stages is widely acknowledged, the wide application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) however, is restrained by big uncertainty in design and material decisions at this stage. The approach presented in this paper aims to provide a proof-of-concept for a...

The vast majority of scientists and policy makers agree that environmental impacts of buildings need to be reduced significantly, and that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology well suited to support this. The importance of evaluating potential improvements to the environmental life cycle performance of buildings in early design stages is wi...

Against the background of changing societies and our planet's changing climate, the project presented deals with the various aspects of sustainability and tries to envision a democratic and sustainable design process supported by technology. To identify the purpose and objectives for the project, a participatory design process with a co-housing gro...

The architectural thesis presented can be understood as the report of an exploration of sustainability, participation and the building life cycle. Against the background of changing societies and our planet’s changing climate, the project presented deals with the various aspects of sustainability, and tries to envision a democratic and sustainable...