Beyond Carbon: Towards a Social Lifecycle Assessment Framework for Green Façades and Green Roofs in Sustainable Building Design: A Systematic Review

Green facades and green roofs are increasingly promoted as core strategies for building decarbonisation, energy-efficient design, and ecological building concepts, with their environmental performance extensively documented through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). However, the social dimension of these interventions, occupant wellbeing, labour conditions embedded in the production of renewable and recycled materials, equity of access to green retrofits, and community acceptance, remains largely absent from mainstream sustainability assessment. This paper conducts a systematic review, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, of the LCA literature on green roofs and living walls published between 2015 and 2025, screening 264 records identified in Scopus and Web of Science down to 45 included studies. The review finds that environmental, economic, and technical performance evaluations dominate this literature, and that the evidence base is heavily concentrated on green roofs (91% of included studies) rather than green facades or living walls (9%). Only one included study (2%) applies a stakeholder-based Social Lifecycle Assessment (S-LCA) to a green roof and two (4%) address social aspects only partially; the other 42 (93%) show no social indicators in their titles, abstracts, or keywords, so social evaluation of vegetated building envelopes remains an isolated, non-cumulative contribution rather than an established practice. Drawing on these findings, this paper develops a preliminary S-LCA framework for green roofs and living walls that extends the worker–user structure of the only applied S-LCA study with value-chain, local-community, and distributive-equity elements, and cross-references the social-performance aspects of EN 16309. The framework provides a more comprehensive approach for researchers and policymakers to assess the broader impacts of building greening strategies beyond conventional environmental performance indicators.