Allocation and characterisation factors for absolute environmental sustainability assessment

Absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) enables the comparison of the environmental impacts from economic sectors against sector-specific thresholds for environmental sustainability. Implementing AESA requires data to establish sector-specific sustainability thresholds and to characterise the environmental impact of elementary flows that are exchanged between the economic sector and the environment. The following dataset comprises the necessary data to perform a planetary-boundary-based AESA. The dataset includes allocation factors for 163 economic sectors across 44 countries and 5 Rest-of-World regions to determine environmental sustainability thresholds. The allocation factors are calculated using four economic allocation methods, based on direct or total and on consumption- or production-based value generated by the economic sector. Additionally, the dataset 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. The dataset includes Python code to calculate the allocation factors and to import the characterisation factors into the life-cycle assessment software Brightway.