Assessing the environmental impacts of passive and active fire protection strategies

Buildings significantly contribute to climate change, prompting growing interest in timber construction for its lower environmental footprint and carbon storage potential. However, biogenic materials introduce notable fire safety challenges. This study presents the Fire Safety Life Cycle Assessment (FS-LCA) framework to quantify environmental impacts of passive and active fire protection strategies. Building products are functionally decomposed and classified according to whether fire safety is their primary or secondary function. The FS-LCA framework is applied to three case studies: a concrete building, a non-sprinklered timber building, and a sprinklered timber building. Across all, fire-regulated elements, encompassing passive fire protection materials, account for approximately 50 % of total embodied impacts across most indicators, largely from the production stage. Active fire protection systems contribute to both production and replacement stages, the latter due to periodic renewals. Fire-regulated burdens are mainly driven by structural support and thermal comfort functions. In the concrete building, primary fire safety is negligible. In the non-sprinklered timber building, primary fire safety comes solely from fire-specific materials, with maximum shares in ADPf (3.95 %) and GWP (3.3 %). In the sprinklered timber building, primary fire safety combines PFP and AFP, with a GWP share of 3.22 %. Secondary fire functions account for over 90 % of FR-related impacts in all cases. These findings demonstrate that the environmental burden of fire protection is shaped by both material selection and the adopted fire safety strategy. Moreover, over-attributing multifunctional materials’ impacts to fire safety risks overestimation, highlighting the need for refined, function-based FS-LCA methods.