Assess­ment of Scope 3 em­ission from new construct­ion in the City of Reykja­vík

This project is a continuation of the project titled “Emissions from future development in the City of Reykjavík: Implementation of Science-based targets for successful climate neutrality goals.” The previous report highlighted the importance of Scope 3 emissions being included in the City of Reykjavík’s carbon accounting methodology for the construction sector, and that without taking actions that would result in rapid emissions reductions, the city could not be able to reach its climate goals. Since the previous report, the City of Reykjavík has updated its climate goals and a new requirement to submit a lifecycle assessment (LCA) to HMS for all new planned buildings in Iceland. To update the estimation of the building stock in both the City of Reykjavík and Iceland, we used the averages from the LCAs from different building types, which have been submitted since September 2025 to update the calculations both from the previous report and the estimations in the “Icelandic Sustainable Construction: Roadmap to 2030”. The estimation of annual emissions utilizing the new LCA data led to slightly higher planned future annual emissions in the City of Reykjavík (120,000 tCO2e vs 132,399 tCO2e) and in Iceland (359,255 tCO2e vs 390,776 tCO2e). We also analyzed the goals and actions described in the City of Reykjavík’s Climate City Contract, and we found that the estimated emission exceeds their goal of 80% reduction of baseline emissions. The future planned emissions for Iceland will lead to emissions above the target, however reducing the size of the dwellings to sufficiency levels (30m2per person) and following planned emission decreases related to construction materials and energy would bring emissions below the target level. These results show that further development of the measurement of emissions coming from the construction sector are continuing to be developed and that more actions are needed to reach the planned goals.