A landscape’s carbon footprint spans construction, maintenance, and eventual removal — this tool estimates each life-cycle stage separately.
| Category | Gross CO₂e (kg) | Reductions | Net CO₂e (kg) | % of Total |
|---|
| Activity | Sub-category | Gross CO₂e (kg) |
|---|
| Phase | Description | Gross CO₂e (kg/yr) | Total Life CO₂e (t) |
|---|
| Phase | Description | CO₂e (kg) |
|---|
| Phase | Description | kg CO₂e | tCO₂e | % of A–C |
|---|
Understanding Whole-Life Carbon: How Each Life-Cycle Stage Is Calculated
Whole-life carbon assessment has become one of the most important disciplines in contemporary design, and understanding how it actually works, stage by stage, is genuinely useful even without running a formal assessment. This guide explains the life-cycle framework used internationally and how each stage is estimated.
Why embodied carbon is only the beginning of the story
When people talk about a material's carbon footprint, they often mean only the emissions associated with extracting, manufacturing, and transporting it to site, corresponding to what the internationally recognised EN 15978 framework, formalised for professional practice in the RICS Whole Life Carbon Assessment standard, labels as stages A1 through A5. But a genuinely complete picture has to look much further than that initial construction footprint, through the entire operational life of the landscape and beyond, which is exactly what the module lettering system in this framework, running from A through D, is designed to capture.
Transport and construction emissions
The transport and construction stage, labelled A4 and A5 within the standard framework, accounts for the fuel burned delivering materials from factory or quarry to site, and the emissions associated with the construction process itself, including plant and machinery fuel use and site energy consumption. This figure scales directly with two variables working together, the carbon intensity of the transport method used, since heavy diesel trucking over long distances carries a materially higher footprint than materials sourced locally or moved by lower-carbon transport, and the sheer distance materials travel, meaning specifying locally quarried stone or regionally produced concrete over an imported equivalent can meaningfully reduce this stage's contribution even before considering the material's inherent carbon intensity.
The often-overlooked maintenance stage
The maintenance stage, labelled B1 through B6, captures the recurring carbon cost of keeping a landscape operational over its full service life, including mowing and grounds maintenance energy use, irrigation pumping energy, replacement planting where establishment losses occur, and periodic replacement of shorter-lived components such as timber decking or bedding planting that will be renewed multiple times over the lifespan being assessed while the surrounding hard landscape endures unchanged. This stage is very easy to underestimate in a simple calculation, because a single maintenance-heavy design choice repeated many times over a twenty or thirty year assessment period can accumulate a surprisingly large total footprint compared to a slightly more expensive but genuinely durable and low-maintenance alternative specified once at construction.
End of life emissions
The end-of-life stage, labelled C1 through C4, accounts for the emissions associated with eventually removing, transporting, and processing materials once the landscape reaches the end of its assessed service life, whether that means demolition energy, transport to a recycling facility or landfill, and the processing emissions associated with whichever disposal route a material follows. Materials that can be readily recycled or reused at end of life generally carry a lower end-of-life footprint than materials destined for landfill, which is a genuine factor worth weighing at the specification stage rather than only at the point of eventual removal.
Why biogenic carbon and Module D can produce a genuinely negative total
Living plant material and soil store carbon as they grow, captured within the framework as biogenic carbon, and this benefit, along with any additional benefits beyond the immediate system boundary such as material recycling potential, is captured in what the standard framework labels Module D. This is exactly why a densely planted scheme built with genuinely lower-carbon hard materials can, once fully assessed across all five stages including Module D, show a net negative figure overall, meaning the landscape draws down more carbon over its assessed life than it emitted to build and maintain, which is one of the strongest arguments available for treating substantial tree and shrub planting as a core design element rather than a decorative afterthought fitted in once the hard landscape budget has already been spent.
Disclaimer
The information and any results referenced on this page are provided for general educational and design comparison purposes only, using generalised carbon factors consistent with the EN 15978 module structure and the RICS Whole Life Carbon Assessment 2023 methodology. This is not a verified Whole Life Carbon Assessment and does not use project-specific Environmental Product Declarations. Figures should not be used for regulatory carbon reporting, planning submissions, or certification claims without validation by a qualified carbon or sustainability consultant using project-specific data.