AESA — Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment
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.
Your commute to work
Enter your one-way distance: the calculator doubles it to cover the round trip.
fossil fuel, 1.2 passengers
Today's result
Within your fair share today
Today's commute uses 71% of your daily climate budget.
- Daily commute
- 4.00 kg CO2-Eq
- Daily fair share
- 5.65 kg CO2-Eq
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. 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.
Sustainability Ratio
References
- 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.
- Bjørn, A., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2013). Absolute versus Relative Environmental Sustainability. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17(2), 321–332.
- Richardson, K., et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37), eadh2458.
- 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.