The development and deployment of U-space holds great promise for unlocking the potential of the drone economy and enabling urban air mobility (UAM) on a wide scale. In addition to the technical and regulatory developments required to realise the full potential of UAM, citizens’ acceptance will be critical to success. To ensure this acceptance, it is essential that UAM operations are planned and conducted in a way that does not impact the quality of living in our cities.

The solution will enable a future U-space service focused on ensuring that UAM operations are both socially acceptable and environmentally sustainable. To this end, the framework will support U-space stakeholders, in particular USSPs and drone operators, in quantifying and evaluating the social and environmental externalities of UAM operations.

The framework comprises the following components:
- A performance framework, which enhances our measurement and understanding capabilities in the areas of noise and visual pollution by providing indicators of UAM impact on the population depending on factors such as age, gender, place of residence, level of income, and occupational status, among others. 
- A decision support framework, which includes: (i) a set of models and simulation tools that calculate the indicators of the performance framework by making use of state-of-the-art noise modelling and dynamic population mapping tools; (ii) a visualisation tool that enables users to analyse the indicators through an interactive dashboard for supporting decision making.
- A set of lessons learnt and recommendations on how to use the Decision Support Framework to minimise the environmental impact of different types of UAM operations.