Reaching consensus on the implementation of carrying capacity allocation in AESA

How can carrying capacity allocation be implemented consistently in Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA)?

AESA involves the normative and influential step of “cutting the cake 🍰” of the planets' resources and boundaries to individual countries, companies and technologies. In addition to assessing and debating the fairness of different ways of doing allocation, we need a clear and agreed methodology for how we apply each individual allocation principle. In order to produce transparent, consistent and comparable AESA studies, we first need consensus on some key questions, including:

-Which equations should be used?
-What data criteria are needed?
-Which methodological choices are appropriate?

Join us for the next DTU Centre for Absolute Sustainability Lunch Seminar as Michael and Anders discuss their process of “Reaching consensus on the implementation of carrying capacity allocation in AESA."

📅 20th October 2026
🕓 12.00-13.00 CEST
📌 At DTU or virtual
🎟️ Participation is free and open to everyone

At the seminar, you will meet:

Michael Hauschild : Professor in quantitative assessment of sustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Lead of the DTU Centre on Absolute Sustainability. He has worked on the development of methods for sustainability assessment of products and technologies for 30 years, including acting as a consultant to the European Commission, creating the groundwork for the standard methodology for life cycle assessment (LCA) of products and systems and authoring a leading textbook on Life Cycle Assessment.

Anders Bjørn : Associate Professor at DTU Sustain and the Centre for Absolute Sustainability. His research focuses on developing and assessing methods to measure environmental burdens of companies and other stakeholders against planetary boundaries, and on setting corresponding impact reduction targets. Anders also works on translating ethical principles for allocating scarce resources into environmental burden allowances for specific stakeholders.