Rabaka Sultana 1, Ahmad Rashedi 1,, Taslima Khanam 1, , Byongug Jeong 2,Homa Hosseinzadeh-Bandbafha 3 and Majid Hussain 4
This article presents a comprehensive overview of the life cycle environmental and energy
assessment for all residential and commercial constructions made of timber walls, globally. The study
was carried out based on a systematic literature analysis conducted on the Scopus database. A total
of 66 research articles were relevant to timber wall design. Among these, the residential construction
sector received more attention than the commercial sector, while the low-rise construction (1–2 stories)
gained more attention than high-rise construction (>5 stories). Most of these studies were conducted in
Canada, Europe, Malaysia, and the USA. In addition, the end-of-life phase received limited attention
compared to upstream phases in most of the studies. We compared all environmental and energybased life cycle impacts that used “m2” as the functional unit; this group represented 21 research
articles. Global warming potential was understandably the most studied life cycle environmental
impact category followed by acidification, eutrophication, embodied energy, photochemical oxidation,
and abiotic depletion. In terms of global warming impact, the external walls of low-rise buildings
emit 18 to 702 kg CO2 kg eq./m2
, while the internal walls of the same emit 11 kg CO2 kg eq./m2
.
In turn, the walls of high-rise buildings carry 114.3 to 227.3 kg CO2 kg eq./m2
in terms of global
warming impact. The review highlights variations in timber wall designs and the environmental
impact of these variations, together with different system boundaries and varying building lifetimes,
as covered in various articles. Finally, a few recommendations have been offered at the end of the
article for future researchers of this domain.