Advancing absolute environmental sustainability assessment: Introducing the first technical guidance and a call for feedback

In recent years Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA) has gained prominence within the industrial ecology community. AESA aims at determining whether an anthropogenic activity is environmentally sustainable by comparing its environmental burdens against carrying capacities that represent the maximum pressure the environment can sustain. Although relatively new, AESA has gained rapid traction both in academic circles, evidenced by the growing number of publications, and beyond, with the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) serving as a prominent example of its application in corporate climate target setting. However, this rapid uptake has occurred without a clear reference guidance, which has led to inconsistent terminology, methodological choices and assumptions and ultimately to results that are difficult to compare across studies. The growing interest in AESA highlights the need for an accessible, broadly applicable guidance to ensure that studies are methodologically consistent. In this column we introduce the first guidance for applying AESA to activities at different scales. The guidance covers the theoretical knowledge and practical tools necessary to conduct AESA across various domains and scales, whilst offering clear instructions on how to structure and carry out an AESA. The intended audience is broad, extending beyond academia to also cover consultancy, industry, government and civil society. To keep the guidance concise and focused on the specificities of AESA, it is expected that readers possess a basic understanding of industrial ecology methods like LCA and environmentally-extended input-output analysis (EE-IOA) and their underlying standards, to which the guidance makes extensive reference. The guidance structures AESA around three main phases and nine steps (as well as eleven sub-steps, which are not included in the Figure for clarity) shepherding the practitioner from inception to completion of a study. Each step is illustrated in the guidance via three cross-cutting case studies: a product-level application covering 40 residential buildings in Denmark, a business-level assessment for a major Indian cement company, and a regional-level application linked to the total consumption of the European Union. The guidance is intended to be informative, not normative: it provides key considerations for methodological choices whilst not prescribing any specific AESA method, dataset or principle to allocate carrying capacities. This approach supports high-level implementation of AESA whilst avoiding constraining future methodological developments. In the following paragraphs we provide a brief overview of the AESA phases and steps.

PAULILLO Andrea;  SANYE MENGUAL Esther;  DE LAURENTIIS Valeria;  VEA Eldbjorg;  HAUSCHILD Michael Zwicky;  SALA Serenella;  BJORN Anders; 

2025-12-15

WILEY

JRC143911

1530-9290 (online),   

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.70113,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC143911,   

10.1111/jiec.70113 (online),