# Insight from Review Articles of Life Cycle Assessment for Buildings
## 1 Introduction  
The life cycle assessment (LCA) method serves as a comprehensive methodological framework for quantitatively evaluating the environmental sustainability of products and industrial processes throughout their cradle-to-grave life cycle stages [1, 2, 3]. This analytical approach systematically integrates material flow analysis, energy auditing, and environmental impact modeling across key life cycle phases, including raw material procurement, manufacturing, operational utilization, and end-of-life management (encompassing disposal, recycling, and recovery processes), and the definition of LCA is shown in Table 1. Consequently, LCA has emerged as a \"cradle-to-grave\" paradigm in environmental science,enabling a multidimensional assessment of resource depletion, pollutant emissions, and ecological footprint while facilitating informed decision-making for sustainable design and circular economy transitions [4; 5; 6]. The application of LCA in the building construction sector (LCA-B) can be traced to about 30 years ago. According to the literature, LCA originated earliest in the manufacturing industry in the 1970s, and then was introduced into the building field in the 1980s [8]. Since 2000, LCA studies on buildings have achieved rapid growth [9]. For instance, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began to promote the LCA standardization framework (such as ISO 14040/14044) around 2006, providing a methodological basis for its application in the field of building construction. Subsequently, research on LCA-B entered a rapid development, and China gradually incorporated LCA into the environmental management practices of the construction industry by drawing on the experiences of developed countries. Figure 1 shows a typical framework of the application of life cycle energy analysis for a building. In general, LCA includes analysis of four phases (i.e., production phase, construction phase, use phase, and end of life phase), the total life cycle energy of a building includes embodied energy (EE) and operational energy (OE) [10; 11], and embodied energy in a building contains direct energy (i.e., energy usage encompassing on-site and off-site operations, covering building construction, component prefabrication, equipment assembly, material transportation, and administration) and indirect energy (i.e., energy used in material production, building renovation, refurbishment and deconstruction processes.) [12]. Over the last decade, the field of LCA-B has received remarkable achievement in technical methods, for instance, the combination of dynamic LCA and real-time data [13; 14; 15; 16; 17], integration of multi-scale assessment system such as the evaluation framework of environment-economy-society [18; 19; 20; 21], interdisciplinary technical collaboration such as integration of building information modeling (BIM) and LCA [22; 23; 24; 25]. LCA and related methodologies have emerged as critical tools for evaluating the environmental, economic, and social impacts of buildings throughout their life cycles [1; 26; 27; 28; 29]. Extensive case studies have been investigated to evaluate the environmental sustainability of buildings in various countries, e.g., USA [30; 31], China [32; 33], Australia [34; 35], Malaysia [36], Spain [37], Finland [38; 39], Canada [40; 41], and the United Kingdom [42; 43]. A systematic literature review can provide a holistic view of a specific topic by summarizing the findings, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives from multiple studies, enabling researchers to grasp the current state of the topic and explore research directions based on a broader academic vision. Many academic studies have reviewed the