All the Nordic countries have ambitions about mitigating the climate changes by reducing the total amount of carbon emissions. Reductions in the building sector are a key element in achieving these targets.

Since 2018, the Nordic building authorities have been discussing future regulation on climate emissions, sharing experiences and working together towards harmonised Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods for buildings.

LCA of buildings is quickly gaining ground in the Nordic countries as the method assesses the whole life climate emissions of buildings, and all the Nordic countries are developing methods and investigating how to include this in the national building regulations. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have already implemented their first set of regulation, Finland will follow in 2025 and Iceland and Estonia are currently considering the same.

However, working with normative climate declarations for buildings is relatively new in all countries, and practices are not yet well established. At this stage, the Nordic countries have a unique window to align approaches, exchange knowledge and research how to create and specify the regulation concerning climate emissions together.

This work package works towards harmonising normative methods for building LCAs in the Nordic countries so that design and construction companies will be able to offer low carbon solutions in all the Nordic countries.

Furthermore, similar approaches will benefit policy-makers on national and municipal levels so that we can support each other’s climate ambitions in regulation and in green public procurement, but also in the European policy development.

Finally, in order to digitalise the Nordic building design, construction and management processes, it is of high importance that we set joint criteria for digital LCA as well.