INDICATE LIFE: Whole-Life Carbon Benchmarks for Austria

A meaningful implementation development has emerged — not a new EU law, but potentially important for Austria’s future whole-life carbon rules.

The EU-backed INDICATE LIFE project is actively developing national whole-life carbon benchmarks for Austria, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg and later Hungary to support EPBD implementation. On 29 September 2026, the European Commission’s CINEA highlighted that these national datasets are intended to support science-based decarbonisation pathways and national policy frameworks. The project also found across 41 case studies that a building LCA typically costs roughly 0.1–2% of total project cost, with most of that cost coming from data collection and immature workflows rather than the calculation itself (CINEA, 29 September 2026).

CINEA also notes that the largest carbon-reduction opportunities arise before major design decisions are fixed.

For Austria specifically, the project consortium has announced that it has analysed 67 Austrian reference buildings and developed the country’s first national whole-life carbon benchmark set. The results are scheduled to be presented publicly on 13 October 2026 in Vienna. The consortium says the resulting performance scale could serve as a basis for future national limit values in Austrian building regulations, as Member States prepare their EPBD roadmaps for 2027 (APA-OTS press release, 15 September 2026).