For most of its history, life cycle assessment has been slow, specialist work. A trained analyst gathers data on every material in a product or building, traces each one back through its supply chain, and assembles the picture by hand. The work is detailed and time-consuming but the results matter. The pace has rarely matched the speed of the decisions it is meant to inform and by the time the numbers land, the concrete has often already been poured.
That gap is starting to close. Panu Pasanen, founder and chief executive of One Click LCA, thinks artificial intelligence will shut it almost entirely within two years. He spoke to Climate Solutions News ahead of Reset Connect in London, and set out a near future in which software proposes whole low-carbon designs while the human expert steers rather than builds. One caveat runs through everything he says about it. As he put it, “it’s not based on trust. It’s based on verification and control mechanism guardrails.”
What Life Cycle Assessment Measures
Life cycle assessment, or LCA, counts the full environmental cost of making something. It follows a product from raw extraction through processing, transport, use, and disposal. The method matters because a headline number can mislead. A material can look clean at the point of installation while carrying heavy emissions from an energy-hungry factory upstream.
Pasanen describes the result as “a true picture” rather than a flattering one. You cannot, he says, simply pick out the low-impact phases of a life cycle and present those, because doing so misleads the buyer, the investor, or the regulator about what a thing really costs the planet. The discipline is governed by the international standards ISO 14040 and 14044, which set four stages: defining the goal and scope, building an inventory of inputs, assessing the impacts, and interpreting the results.
In construction, that accounting has become urgent. Buildings and construction account for around 37 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the latest UN Environment Programme status report. Embodied carbon, the emissions locked into materials such as steel and cement before anyone moves in, makes up close to a fifth of building-related emissions and stays largely untracked.
Why Embodied Carbon Is The Harder Problem
Operational carbon, the energy a building burns once it is running, comes with a natural feedback loop. It shows up on a bill, so owners work to bring it down. Embodied carbon offers no such signal. It is spent at the start, then it is gone, invisible on any statement.
Pasanen makes the contrast through the grid. The embodied carbon, he notes, does not show up in your energy bills. A national energy supply can be cleaned up centrally, he adds. Switch on a new nuclear plant and the whole country’s electricity gets greener, with no building owner lifting a finger. Embodied carbon has no equivalent shortcut. “For every building where you want to reduce the embodied carbon you have to do it decision by decision at the project level,” he says.
Then there is the budget. A carmaker, he points out, can spend a hundred million on research and then optimise the environmental impact at leisure. A building project has neither the time nor the money for that. So the task became making rigorous assessment fast enough to fit the way projects already run. That problem, Pasanen argues, went unsolved before his company existed.
How One Click LCA speeds up the work
The traditional bottleneck is data. An assessment can stall for weeks while a team waits on one supplier to confirm the make-up of one component. One Click LCA, which Pasanen has led since 2010, was built to take out that friction. It pulls data straight from the design and procurement systems firms already use, then matches it against scientifically validated impact databases.
Software now fills the gaps that once halted the work. Picture a complex system missing data for a single part, with a silent supplier at the other end of the email. In the old model the whole process could stop there. The platform instead generates a validated dataset for that part almost instantly, for anything used in mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems or general building products. In Pasanen’s words, that kind of thing cuts out “potential weeks of delays and hassle”. The same techniques check data quality and reformat inputs, stripping out manual labour and, more to the point, lead time.
The company’s reach has grown to match the ambition. One Click LCA is used in more than 170 countries, and Pasanen puts headcount at over three hundred. In September 2025 it acquired SimaPro and its developer PRé Sustainability, pairing a science-led modelling tradition with its own speed-led one. The combined platform holds more than 500,000 datasets and targets a million users by 2035.
Two Traditions, Reconciled
The SimaPro deal brought two ways of working under one roof. One Click LCA built its name on software designed to run at the speed of a live project. SimaPro came from a scientific background, with deep inventory modelling that gives analysts control at a far more granular level. Both, Pasanen says, produce correct results. One gives you speed, the other gives you control at a different level.
He frames the combination as range rather than compromise. The aim is to let customers “go deep where it’s appropriate”, on the parts of a supply chain that genuinely need it, while running repeatable assessments at scale everywhere else. The acquisition also widens the map. It takes the company into consumer products and pharmaceuticals, sectors it could not serve before, which Pasanen reckons roughly doubles the pace at which it can chase its user target.
Where The AI Is Heading
Today’s tools keep the human in charge at every step. The user sees what the software proposes, then signs off or does not. Pasanen expects that to shift fast. Within about eighteen months, he predicts, AI will move from validating individual steps to proposing an entire design, “and then the user is more steering it”.
The prospect is a whole eco-design proposal, generated for a human expert to review and direct rather than assemble from scratch. He ties the value straight to the climate goal. Decarbonisation, he notes, is rarely something clients pay for as a separate line. Folding it into a faster workflow is how it actually gets done.
Control, Not Trust
The obvious risk is accuracy. Hand more of the work to a model and the question of whether you can trust the output rears its head. Pasanen’s answer is that trust is the wrong frame. The company monitors its AI constantly, tests it against large validated datasets, and builds guardrails that reject a proposal when warning flags are raised.
The system also grades its own confidence. Say it returns ten proposals for a project, of which eight are strong, one is middling, and one is weak. The job, Pasanen says, is to tell the user which is which. Discard the two weakest and you still gain from the eight the software backs. Responsibility stays with the vendor to prove the tool performs and to flag where it is unsure.
That philosophy answers the worry the whole field carries about automation. The promise of LCA was always to end up with the accurate number rather than the flattering one. As the measuring speeds up and more of it falls to machines, the discipline that made it credible still has to hold.
Panu Pasanen is founder and chief executive of One Click LCA. He spoke to the Climate Solutions News podcast ahead of Reset Connect London 2026, at Excel London on 23 and 24 June. CSN is a media partner.
