Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA)
Is Your Commute to Work Absolute Sustainable?
Standard life-cycle assessment asks if option A is better than option B. Absolute environmental sustainability assessment asks if the option considered is good enough. Here follows a tiny tool that compares your daily commute to your fair share of the climate planetary boundary.
How it works
Better, but is it good enough?
The numerator
Your daily commute footprint is each leg's one-way distance, doubled for the round trip, times a full life-cycle emission factor for that mode: not just tailpipe, but vehicle, fuel, and infrastructure. Those factors are local: every electric mode is charged at the local grid. Walking counts too: the calories you burn are replaced by food, and that footprint depends on your diet.
The denominator
Your per-capita share of the climate planetary boundary, downscaled egalitarian-style to 2050 and split across 365 days: your fair share for one day, before you've eaten a meal or heated a flat. This number does not change with your region: the boundary is shared equally per person worldwide.
Sustainability Ratio
References
- [1]Hauschild, M. Z. (2015). Better – But is it Good Enough? On the Need to Consider Both Eco-efficiency and Eco-effectiveness to Gauge Industrial Sustainability. Procedia CIRP, 29, 1–7.
- [2]Bjørn, A., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2013). Absolute versus Relative Environmental Sustainability. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17(2), 321–332.
- [3]Richardson, K., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.
- [4]Serrano, T., Meramo, S., Bjørn, A., Hauschild, M., Sukumara, S., & Sommer, M. O. A. (2025). Communicating the environmental impacts of individual actions in the context of Planetary Boundaries. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 56, 420–430.