One of the main objectives facing climate protection targets is how to deal with the existing building stock. Refurbishment measures are essential to ensure sustainable urban transformation. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) enable refurbishment measures to be evaluated holistically at the environmental level. However, there is still no sufficient methodological basis for the uniform evaluation. This present paper proposes a new perspective for comparing the continuing use with refurbishment as well as the demolition and new construction of a building. Thus, two new indicators are presented and elaborated regarding refurbishment measures: sustained emissions and the avoidance potential. To verify and validate the newly developed methodology, we implement it as part of this case study. We compare the environmental impact of a building’s continuing use with refurbishment measures as well as demolition and a replacement building with functional equivalence. The results indicate the environmental benefits of refurbishment measures compared to other approaches towards existing buildings. Although new buildings typically possess a superior energy standard, nevertheless, irrespective of the major impact of operational energy, refurbishment measures appear to be the most viable option for dealing with existing buildings over their life cycle.

Increasing the use of sustainably sourced wood in construction for temporal carbon storage could be one vital part in the transition towards reaching the sustainable development goals for climate action and sustainable cities and communities. This paper explains the detailed steps from the planning to the realization process and shows how building with wood could be linked to the entire process from the sales of building plots to the realization of projects. Additionally, based on EN 15978, life cycle assessment (LCA) results of the constructed buildings were conducted to calculate the realistic carbon storage and the global warming potential for all new erected buildings on the site. The case study area and living lab is a building site in Munich with 566 flats, which will be finished in 2020 and will be the largest urban timber neighborhood in Germany by then. All development activities are summarized under the concept of building an eco-city with low carbon emissions and a high standard for living for all groups of inhabitants. Eight buildings with different material selections ranging from wood-constructions to wood-concrete hybrid constructions and concrete constructions with different energy standards are environmentally assessed. Results show that about 12.5 million kg of CO₂ are stored in the wooden structures over the estimated life cycle of 50 years within this neighborhood. This clearly demonstrates the potential that building with wood has for achieving climate targets. Further results show that heating energy demand and material choices have a significant influence on LCA results.