Publications related to Individual action on climate change

The impacts of decarbonization pathways on Sustainable Development Goals in the European Union

Climate action to achieve the Paris Agreement should respect the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Here, we use an integrated assessment modelling framework comprising nine climate policy models and quantify the impacts of decarbonisation pathw ...

2024

Embodied Carbon Premium for Cantilevers

David Michael Volpe Ruggiero, Paola Costanza Miglietta

This study addresses the critical need for sustainable architectural designs within the context of climate change and the significant role the built environment plays in greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of this paper is on understanding the influence of ...

2024

Towards a Radical Housing Responsibility

Luca Giovanni Pattaroni, Ifigeneia Dimitrakou

Responsibility—as an analytic or topic of political debate—is out of vogue in critical housing studies. Rather than offering progressive potential, the call for responsibility has been seen to foster neoliberal governance, racial structural violence, and f ...

2023

Mining Effective Strategies for Climate Change Communication

Matthias Grossglauser, Aswin Suresh, Lazar Milikic, Yurui Zhu

With the goal of understanding effective strategies to communicate about climate change, we build interpretable models to rank tweets related to climate change with respect to the engagement they generate. Our models are based on the Bradley-Terry model of ...

2023

Drivers and Barriers Toward Healthy and Environmentally Sustainable Eating in Switzerland: Linking Impacts to Intentions and Practices

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Ivo Philippe Baur, Ralph Hansmann

Food consumption is among the activities with the most significant environmental impacts, and furthermore contributes to rising health costs. We explored the factors that foster or hinder healthy and sustainable eating in Switzerland. Based on an online ho ...

2022

Discrete-Choice Mining of Social Processes

Victor Kristof

Poor decisions and selfish behaviors give rise to seemingly intractable global problems, such as the lack of transparency in democratic processes, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. However, people are more predict ...

EPFL2021

Reducing personal air-travel: Restrictions, options and the role of justifications

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Ralph Hansmann

An integrative environmental behavior model was applied in an online survey to investigate the determinants of intentions to reduce personal air travel and corresponding perceived restrictions and options among participants in Switzerland (N = 1206). Flyin ...

2021

Low emission scenario for Europe powered by lifestyle changes

Vincent Moreau, Luis Costa

Decarbonizing economic activities requires simultaneous behavioural and technological changes. At the household level, actions are straightforward, use public transit and stay off dairy and meat. The objective here is to estimate the overall climate benefi ...

2020

Concerns of young protesters are justified

Philippe Thalmann, Dominique Bourg

In this letter, we recall that young people's concerns about climate change are based on our best scientific knowledge and that the measures taken so far by our authorities to protect the climate and the biosphere are far from up to the threat. We therefor ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2019

A User Study of Perceived Carbon Footprint

Patrick Thiran, Matthias Grossglauser, Victor Kristof, Robin Adrien Zbinden, Lucas Maystre, Valentin Quelquejay-Leclère

We propose a statistical model to understand people's perception of their carbon footprint. Driven by the observation that few people think of CO2 impact in absolute terms, we design a system to probe people's perception from simple pairwise comparisons of ...

2019

Hospital climate actions and assessment tools: a scoping review protocol

Nicola Mary Banwell

Introduction Health and climate change are inexorably linked through the exacerbation of health risks and the contribution of the health sector to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate action in healthcare settings is critical to reduce risks and impacts of cl ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2019

Carbon Footprint of Academic Air Travel: A Case Study in Switzerland

László Dániel Tóth, Guillaume Jean Op 't Veld, Joachim Armand Simonne Ciers, Aleksandra Mandic

Relatively low travel costs and abundant opportunities for research funding in Switzerland and other developed countries allow researchers large amounts of international travel and collaborations, leading to a substantial carbon footprint. Increasing willi ...

2019

Unsupervised algorithm for disaggregating low-sampling-rate electricity consumption of households

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Lionel Benjamin Bloch, Jordan Holweger, Marina Dorokhova

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) has been extensively researched over the last decade. The objective of NILM is to identify the power consumption of individual appliances and to detect when particular devices are on or off from measuring the power cons ...

2019

An integrative approach for embodied energy: Towards an LCA-based data-driven design method

Marilyne Andersen, Emmanuel Rey, Thomas Bernard Paul Jusselme

The built environment is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To tackle climate change, global targets have been set for this sector. Although life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods are typically used to evaluate a building project ...

2018

Critical raw materials: A perspective from the materials science community

Heinrich Hofmann

Functional materials are crucial to meet today's societal challenges and needs, such as the transition towards low carbon energy production to reduce climate change, renewable energies and green economy, clean mobility and improved communication. In order ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2018

From COP21 pledges to a fair 2°C pathway

Marc Vielle, Frédéric Louis François Babonneau, Alain Haurie

At COP21, about 160 countries proposed the so-called INDCs that define GHG abatement objectives by 2030. While encouraging, these commitments are not ambitious enough to achieve the 2°C threshold by 2100, and further negotiations are needed for sharing the ...

2018

Analyzing Large-Scale Public Campaigns on Twitter

Karl Aberer, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Julia Proskurnia, Roman Prokofyev

Social media has become an important instrument for running various types of public campaigns and mobilizing people. Yet, the dynamics of public campaigns on social networking platforms still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present an in-depth ...

Springer Int Publishing Ag2016

Coordinating transport and urban planning: from ideologies to local realities

Vincent Kaufmann, Hanja-Niriana Maksim

In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives un ...

Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd2013

Impact of biofuels production on land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions : methodological framework and system dynamics modeling applied to soybean-based biodiesel production in Argentina

Luis Alberto Panichelli

This research assesses the effect of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission constraints imposed in biofuel importing countries on the export potential of biofuel producing countries. Several countries are promoting the introduction of biofuels on their energy matri ...

EPFL2012