Forest dynamics in LCA: Integrating carbon fluxes from forest management systems into the life cycle assessment of a building.

• Integrating carbon models for forest systems into a LCA of a building for detailed carbon dynamics when using wood in buildings. • Including temporal forest carbon dynamics shift the weight of environmental impacts between current and future emissions. • The results are highly sensitive to the modeling assumptions, in particularly the system boundaries, level of perspective, allocation principles. • Building design incentives remain similar when applying the method from the European standard or this study's approach. • Forest dynamics in LCA alter the environmental impacts of using wood in buildings and should be addressed in future recommendations for building LCAs. The urgent issue of climate change has sparked increasing interest in using wood to reduce buildings' greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe). While attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are commonly employed to estimate GHGe from buildings, they lack a temporal distribution of carbon fluxes from biogenic materials, overlooking forest management impacts on emissions and sequestration. Consequently, we investigated the integration of forest and building systems, examining emissions associated with three different forest management scenarios at stand and landscape levels. Our findings suggest a 6 % to 81 % lower GHGe for the building using this study's approach compared to the static methodology recommended by the European Standard EN16485 in a 50 year perspective. However, the accumulated impact over the building's lifetime remains similar. Hence, both methods incentivize building designers' to use wood to lower GHGe, although the dynamic integration postpones benefits from the forests' carbon sequestration to later stages of the building's lifetime. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]