Bridging LCA and urban construction quotas: A novel framework for sponge city infrastructure in semi-arid China

Sponge city source control facilities are increasingly recognized as essential for urban stormwater management, yet systematic quantification of their environmental and economic co-benefits remains limited. This study develops an integrated evaluation framework that links standardized engineering work-quantity norms with life cycle assessment (LCA), embedding construction quota logic to enhance reproducibility and policy applicability. Using the Ecoinvent v3.11 database and the ReCiPe 2016 method, the framework evaluates four source control facility types of permeable pavements, stormwater storage modules, vegetated swales, and bioretention in semi-arid Northwest China under both baseline and dynamic conditions, including CMIP6 climate scenarios and long-term performance degradation. Results indicate that life cycle costs per functional unit are ¥343,400, ¥26,100, ¥706,600, and ¥772,300, respectively. Environmental payback periods remain within 8.63 years for most categories, while economic payback times range from 2.9 to 11.2 years. Construction materials and transportation dominate environmental burdens. The contributions of this study are threefold: it embeds engineering semantics into LCA for practical alignment, integrates climate dynamics and facility degradation into scenario modeling, and jointly evaluates environmental and economic paybacks. Together, these advances establish a transferable, quota-driven tool to support sustainable sponge city development in water-scarce and data-constrained regions.