Tackling the next generation of debris hiding in orbit: Carbon fibres

Background Information
The ESA Green Agenda outlines the action plan to meet the objectives of the Agenda 2025 “to ensure that ESA and European space programmes can support the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal to the fullest extent” by improving its own environmental responsibility and reducing its GHG emissions. 
The ESA Green Agenda has two objectives related to space programmes: increasing their benefits to society (handprint) and reducing their environmental impacts (footprint). The Sustainability Strategy for ESA activities and programmes intends to ensure the systematic assessment of sustainability objectives in preparing and implementing ESA space programmes and activities.

Objective of this assessment
This Sustainability Maturity Assessment (SMA) aims to ensure that ESA has a consistent and aligned methodology across programmes and projects to measure and maximise the Agency's overall sustainability impact. Ultimately, this will allow ESA to send a clear message to the Member States at CM25 about its strong commitment to sustainability using concrete examples and a consistent and aligned methodology.
To this end, the Climate and Sustainability office makes available to proposal managers this simple SMA tool to assess the alignment of CM25 proposals to sustainability objectives.
This assessment provides Proposal Managers with sustainability elements to be included in the key objectives and main selling points of each new CM25 programme proposals. The IP-Rev process will consider these elements before final submission to member states in programme boards. In addition, some programme proposals will benefit from a full socio/economic/sustainability ex-ante assessment – in close collaboration with CIC colleagues and proposal managers – through more specific evaluations to be included in supporting documents.

About this assessment

The assessment covers six sustainability objectives which have been defined based on different reference frameworks (Paris Agreement, United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (UN SDGs), the European Union Green Deal, the European Union Taxonomy, FIT for 55 and ESA Corporate Social Responsibility Principles).

Sustainability Objectives: 

• Climate Change Action and Mitigation 
• Biodiversity and Ecosystem Conservation 
• Circular economy 
• Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure 
• Human Health
• Social Equity and Accessibility

The assessment covers one sustainability objective per section. The responder is tasked with deciding to what extent these objectives apply to their program proposal and providing their rationale and sources in the comments section.

Scale
The following scale should be used as reference to rate the proposal's contribution to the sustainability objectives.
Directly:
The proposal directly addresses this objective and will contribute significantly to resolving the issue(s) it addresses. The proposal addresses (an) issue(s) that are highly significant for that objective.
Indirectly:
The proposal indirectly addresses the objective, allows limited progress towards that objective, or allows a good level of progress to resolve an issue that is not highly significant for that objective.
No contribution: 
Despite an applicable context, the proposal does not set any strategy, objectives, or targets related to this statement. There could be a contribution in the future.
Opposite contribution: 
The strategy objectives and targets oppose this sustainability objective.
Not Applicable: 
The context of the proposal is genuinely not applicable to this objective.