Rethinking Post-Disaster Shelters: An Integrated LCA of Environmental, Techno-Economic and Resilience Across Three Modern Methods of Construction

The increasing frequency and severity of natural and human-induced disasters are intensifying the need for post-disaster shelters that can be rapidly deployed while delivering low environmental impact, affordability and acceptable occupant comfort. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), including Three-Dimensional Printing (3DP), prefabrication and modular container-based systems, offer promising solutions for accelerating emergency housing delivery. However, their environmental, economic and thermal performance is rarely assessed within an integrated life-cycle framework, limiting robust comparison and evidence-based technology selection. This study addresses this gap by developing an integrated assessment framework combining Whole-Life Carbon (WLC), Life-Cycle Costing (LCC), and dynamic thermal simulation to comparatively evaluate three MMC-based emergency shelter systems over a 15-year service life. Applied to a representative post-disaster scenario, the framework reveals clear performance trade-offs among the three systems. Container-based shelters demonstrate the strongest overall environmental and economic performance, achieving the lowest whole-life energy consumption, carbon emissions and life-cycle costs. Compared with container-based shelters, 3DP shelters exhibit 7% higher whole-life energy consumption, 39% higher whole-life carbon emissions and 26% higher life-cycle costs. Relative to prefabricated shelters, 3DP shelters show 3% higher whole-life energy consumption, 37% higher whole-life carbon emissions and 12% higher life-cycle costs. In contrast, 3DP shelters deliver substantially better thermal performance, achieving approximately 70% predicted thermal satisfaction, compared with approximately 50% for both container-based and prefabricated shelters. The findings demonstrate a pronounced trade-off between environmental impact, economic efficiency and occupant thermal comfort, confirming that no single MMC system simultaneously optimises all performance dimensions. This challenges single-criterion approaches to post-disaster shelter selection and highlights the importance of integrated life-cycle decision-making. The proposed framework provides a transferable approach for evaluating emerging MMC shelter technologies and identifying context-specific solutions under time, resource and performance constraints. The findings offer evidence-based decision support for humanitarian organisations, policymakers and construction practitioners, while highlighting targeted opportunities to improve the material, energy and process efficiency of 3DP to enhance its environmental and economic competitiveness in future post-disaster applications.