Sustainability Maturity Assessment
Background Information
ESA’s vision for sustainability extends across three interconnected environments: Earth, Earth's orbit, and the moon and deep space. ESA aims to develop technologies, missions, applications and services that maximise societal benefits, while minimising the environmental of its own activities. This is reflected in ESA Strategy 2040, whose first objective is to develop the technologies, missions, applications and services that will enable progress in acting to address climate change, degradation of the environment and pressure on natural resources.
Sustainability has become a strategic differentiator for European space activities. ESA’s Green Agenda sets two overarching goals:
- Maximise sustainability benefits by increasing ESA’s contribution to the sustainable development of society.
- Minimise environmental impacts by reducing GHG emissions and other pressures associated with ESA’s operations, infrastructure and programmes. By 2030, ESA aims to achieve a 46% reduction for operational activities and 28% for supply chain activities, compared with 2019 levels
Focusing on the first goal, ESA is implementing a range of methodologies and tools to identify, assess, and increase the sustainability benefits to society.
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 projects sustainability benefits. By completing the SMA at the beginning or during an activity, will be possible to identify priority areas to evaluate and potentially further increase the project’s sustainability benefits, and build a clear basis for future work. Ultimately, this will allow ESA to send a clear message to the Member States about its strong commitment to sustainability using concrete examples and a consistent and aligned methodology. To this end, the Strategic Sustainability Office makes available this SMA tool to easily assess the alignment of activities to sustainability benefits.
About this assessment
The assessment covers six sustainability areas of benefits 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 Areas of Benefits:
- Climate Change Action and Mitigation
- Biodiversity and Ecosystem Conservation
- Resource Efficiency
- Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure
- Human Health
- Social Equity and Accessibility
The assessment covers one sustainability area of benefit per section. The responder is tasked with deciding to what extent these benefits apply to their activity and providing their rationale and sources in the comments section.
IMPORTANT: SMA results are for internal ESA use only and do not serve as official certification or external proof.
Once the assessment is complete, the tool will display your current rating and a visual summary of your responses. A PDF compilation of your results and answers will also be generated for your records.
Scale
The following scale should be used as reference to rate the proposal's contribution to the sustainability areas of benefits.
Directly: The proposal directly addresses this benefit and will contribute significantly to resolving the issue(s) it addresses. The proposal addresses (an) issue(s) that are highly significant for that benefit.
Indirectly: The proposal indirectly addresses the benefit, allows limited progress towards that benefit, or allows a good level of progress to resolve an issue that is not highly significant for that benefit.
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 benefit.
Not Applicable: The context of the proposal is genuinely not applicable to this benefit
No published results yet.