Teaching Life Cycle Assessment: An Accessible Approach for Future Architects and Building Professionals

Architects play a vital role in decarbonization efforts. Architects need the skills to assess the environmental impacts of their designs while understanding how early-stage design decisions shape the environmental impacts of their final designs. However, most academic structures do not provide future architects with the skills and knowledge needed to perform life cycle assessment (LCA) nor understand the linkages between design decisions and environmental impacts. Based on experiences from teaching LCA and life cycle thinking to architecture students in Brazil and the United Kingdom, we outline our vision for providing architecture students with the skills needed by industry to navigate the ever-changing climate crisis. We highlight that not everyone needs to do a full-scale assessment, but everyone should be able to engage in conversations related to sustainability and impact reduction.