Abstract Natural disasters such as recent earthquakes have highlighted the importance of resilience against natural hazards as a key component of sustainability. Evaluating existing buildings under sustainable perspective requires the understanding of building’s life cycle stages exposed to these disasters. In comprehensive life cycle analysis (LCA) of a building, damage repair costs and downtime (economy component), environmental emissions and waste generation (environmental impact component), and deaths (society component) should be quantified and evaluated (Gencturk et al., Eng Struct 110:347–362 [1]). After any earthquake, damage repair costs and downtime causing harmful impacts due to additional material and energy consumption, and also generating additional waste production, despite of consideration other important impacts such as deaths and injuries. Therefore to minimize these impacts, researchers have taken different approaches, and they assessed the impacts of a single building in different form and details focused on whole building or individual building systems. Or in some cases they performed a comparative study and focused on comparing the different impacts between two or more buildings, aiming to optimize a comprehensive model that has a more sustainable structure. Most of the previous comparative LCA studies have been, however, applied to evaluate the environmental impact between two or more buildings without considering structural performance of the buildings. Recently, in addition to the environmental impact of the aforementioned conventional activities, researchers have attempted to incorporate seismic risks into traditional building LCA models and developed appropriate methods for comparing different design alternatives with respect to the impact of seismic damages and their recovery activities. The evaluation of five LCA studies, which took into account both the environmental and structural performance of earthquake-affected structural systems, will be the primary focus of this paper. The paper will also examine the main factors that influenced the assessment's findings and provide a summary of the most significant findings of them.
