Integrating life cycle assessment and emissions trading scheme in the Australian construction sector: A preliminary study.

Abstract

Construction carbon mitigation is increasingly moving beyond operational energy, with growing attention directed towards embodied carbon in materials. Life cycle assessment (LCA) offers a means to quantify these emissions, yet its uptake is constrained by data limitations, varied organisational capability, and fragmented decision-making processes. Carbon pricing under an emissions trading scheme (ETS) faces similar adoption barriers. In the absence of a workable accounting interface, ETS-derived carbon costs rarely enter project-level engineering and procurement trade-offs. This exploratory study examines the feasibility of embedding ETS logic within an LCA framework, and clarifies the conditions under which such integration could operate in practice. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five industry practitioners, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The results indicate that participants generally valued the LCA–ETS integration, particularly when concrete carbon information is available in time to inform procurement choices. Key implementation barriers include weak policy and verification credibility, immature early-stage information, and delivery-side workflow frictions. Key enabling conditions include stable policy signals, minimum data and verification standards, and an accounting interface that can be embedded into routine procurement decision-making. The study offers preliminary, project-grounded insights into the conditions under which LCA–ETS integration may become workable in construction project delivery.