AESA — Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment
Is your commute absolute sustainable?
Standard life-cycle assessment asks better than what? Absolute sustainability asks good enough for what? A tiny tool that compares your daily commute to your fair share of the climate planetary boundary.
Your commute
occupancy ≈ 1.2
Within your fair share today
Today's commute uses 89% of your daily climate budget.
- Daily commute
- 4.0 kg CO₂e
- Daily fair share
- 4.5 kg CO₂e
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 a working year — your fair share for a single commute day, before you've eaten a meal or heated a flat.
Sustainability Ratio SR = daily commute impact ÷ daily fair share
SR ≤ 1 → within your fair share. SR > 1 → overshoot.
References
- Bjørn, A., & Hauschild, M. Z. (2013). Absolute versus Relative Environmental Sustainability. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 17(2), 321–332.
- 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.
- 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.