Brightcon 2025, hackathon & courses in Grenoble and online

Rising environmental pressure from anthropogenic systems asserts the need to evaluate anthropogenic systems designs in terms of environmental sustainability. Absolute environmental sustainability assessment enables such an evaluation by comparing the anthropogenic system’s environmental impacts against system-specific thresholds for environmental sustainability. However, this approach depends on the availability of system-specific sustainability thresholds as well as characterisation factors to determine the environmental impact of the anthropogenic system’s elementary flows.
To address this gap, we present a Python package that enables a planetary-boundary-based absolute environmental sustainability assessment (PB-AESA). The Python package enables the calculation of allocation factors from time-explicit multi-regional input-output tables to determine planetary-boundary-based environmental sustainability thresholds. Additionally, the Python package provides characterisation factors for the 2684 elementary flows within standard and prospective ecoinvent v3.10.1 databases, enabling the assessment of the elementary flows’ environmental impact on all global planetary boundary categories except novel entities, and imports the characterisation factors into Brightway. We thus provide a Python package enabling PB-AESA for a broad scope of anthropogenic systems and takes steps towards standardisation of PB-AESA.