Work-life (im)balance: an assessment of housing and commuting energy use inequalities in Switzerland

Abstract

Energy use reductions are necessary for climate mitigation and energy security, but to be equitable, any policy aiming to reduce final energy use should take into account the prevailing inequalities, as well as their determinants. In this article, we first quantify the individual final energy use related to every- day residential and commuting activities for 3848 individuals representative of the Swiss population and analyze their distributions. We then assess how socio-economic, infrastructural, and behavioral determinants affect individual energy use using regression analysis. Finally, we build two typologies of commuting and housing living conditions to map the inequality space using regression tree anal- ysis. We find that energy use is more unequally distributed between individuals than income, with the top 20% energy users being responsible for 76% and 53% of the total energy use for commuting and housing respectively. Age and income are determinants of energy use for both domains. We also identify a significant gender gap for commuting, which tends to widen as the household size increases. Top energy users can be characterized for housing as individuals living alone in more than 64 m2 per capita with no heat pump, and for commuting as individuals commuting more than 20 km by personal vehicle. Top users for housing tend to differ from the ones for commuting, which may increase pol- icy acceptability and decrease vulnerability Our results call for policies that target top users, include sufficiency levers, and goes beyond costs only approaches to be age and gender inclusive.