Download Project LCA Baseline Guidance

Project Life Cycle Assessment Baseline Guidance
(September 2026)

Following years of collaboration amongst various individual groups, built environment industry leaders in North America have come together to create a coalition to accelerate and strategize how to rapidly reduce embodied carbon in the built environment.

As organizations currently or imminently gathering embodied carbon data from the built environment industry, creating tools and resources, and building awareness about this critical issue, we believe that we can move faster together.

In this document, ECHO defines aligned guidance on how to utilize project Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to construct a fair comparison between baseline and proposed projects. This document intends to provide a single, common project LCA baseline guidance document that a wide variety of embodied carbon initiatives and policies can reference directly in their programs. While the project LCA scope and requirements of different initiatives and policies represented in ECHO vary widely and will not be defined in this document, the nature of fair comparison can be defined across these program differences. This is the approach taken in this guidance.

Acknowledgements

This report is a project of ECHO. The research team would like to thank the working group participants for their feedback throughout the development of this guidance from April to August of 2026. While their input informed this publication, inclusion of their names does not indicate total agreement with all aspects of the publication, and inclusion of their affiliation is for informational purposes only and does not represent an endorsement of the publication.

This document owes a debt of gratitude to the committee that authored the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Whole-Building Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner’s Guide (Picken, R. et. al., 2024), from which much of this content was based and then expanded. 

Please see the report document for the complete list of contributors and working group members.

Authors

  • Kristina Farrell, Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF)

  • Aurora Jensen, CLF

  • Wes Sullens, U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)

  • Lyndsay Watkins, USGBC

  • Colleen Loader, Canada Green Building Council (CAGBC)

  • Pamela Conrad, Climate Positive Design (CPD)

  • Alejandra Hinojosa, American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)/LPA

  • Luke Leung, MEP 2040

Author contributions: Writing – original draft: K.F., A.J., W.S., L.W., C.L., P.C., A.H., L.L.; Writing – review and editing: K.F., A.J., W.S., L.W., C.L., P.C., A.H., L.L., Meghan Lewis (CLF), Michelle Lambert (CLF), Frances Yang (CLF); Conceptualization: W.S., L.W., A.J., M.L.; Methodology: K.F., A.J., W.S., L.W., C.L., P.C., A.H., L.L.; Visualization and Graphics: K.F. 

Citations

Farrell, K., Sullens, W., Watkins, L., Hinjosa, A., Conrad, P., Leung, L., Loader, C., Jensen, A. (2026). Project LCA Baseline Guidance: ECHO Aligned Guidance for Adoption, Version 1.0., Pilot. ECHO Project. https://www.echo-project.info/publications