Abstract Absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) enables the comparison of the environmental burdens 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 burden of elementary flows that are exchanged between the sector and the environment. Yet, a reusable dataset for AESA is currently lacking. 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 allocation principles that combine population-based allocation with allocation 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 burden across all global planetary boundary categories except novel entities.
Hartmann et al. (Sat,) studied this question.