A systematic review of low carbon construction across material, envelope, and building scales in hot and arid climates

Hot-arid regions face a distinctive construction decarbonization challenge. Rapid urban expansion, long cooling seasons, high solar gains, water scarcity, dust exposure, saline coastal environments, and future heat intensification interact with the embodied carbon of materials and the operational carbon of cooling. This systematic review synthesizes evidence on low-carbon construction material strategies, particularly concrete and cementitious systems, for hot-arid regions, and examines their cross scale implications for wall and envelope performance, and whole building life cycle outcomes. The review corpus comprises 84 studies published between 2014 and 2025 and identified through Scopus and Google Scholar searches. The corpus is complemented by authoritative standards, global climate and building sector reports, and high impact review literature used as supplementary contextual sources. The evidence shows that clinker reduction, supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), recycled aggregates, lightweight concrete and other lightweight materials, biowaste derived products, biochar, CO 2 curing, and AI-assisted concrete design can reduce embodied impacts, but their performance is highly contingent on functional unit, system boundary, transport distance, electricity mix, mechanical strength, durability, and local material availability. Namely, expanded perlite is a volcanic glass that is identified as a key and promising aggregate to lower embodied carbon intensity and lead to carbon abatement in the construction industry. At the envelope scale, U–value alone is insufficient for hot-arid design; density, heat capacity, insulation position, thermal lag, solar absorptance, airtightness, shading, moisture transport, and service life determine whether a material level carbon reduction also lowers cooling demand. At the building scale, improved energy systems, photovoltaics (PV), district cooling, and optimized envelope design can substantially reduce operational energy, but this increases the relative importance of embodied emissions and exposes inconsistencies in life cycle assessment (LCA) practice. The review proposes a climate conditioned whole life carbon framework that links materials, envelope physics, building systems, and policy instruments. It identifies urgent research needs in Gulf specific LCA inventories, regional environmental product declaration (EPD) infrastructure, durability testing under hot saline conditions, coupled thermal energy carbon modeling, and procurement ready carbon benchmarks. Low-carbon construction in hot-arid climates therefore requires coordinated design and assessment methods rather than isolated material substitution.