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

Reductions of final energy use are necessary for climate mitigation and energy security, but to be equitable, policies should take into account prevailing inequalities and their determinants. In this article, we first quantify final energy use related to everyday housing and commuting activities for 3848 individuals representative of the Swiss population, and analyze their distributions. We then assess how socio-economic, geographical, infrastructural, and behavioral determinants affect individual energy use through regression analysis. Finally, we build two typologies of commuting and housing determinants and context to map the inequality space using regression tree analysis. 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. We identify a significant gender gap for commuting, which widens as the household size increases. For housing, the top energy users can be characterized as individuals who are older and richer, living alone in more than 64 m² per capita with no heat pump. For commuting, the top energy users can be characterized as individuals who are middle-aged and richer, commuting more than 20 km by personal vehicle. The top users for housing tend to differ from the ones for commuting, which may increase policy acceptability and decrease vulnerability. Our results call for policies that target top users, include sufficiency levers, and go beyond cost-only approaches to be age and gender inclusive.