Energy requirements for securing wellbeing in Switzerland and the space for affluence and inequality

Joel Millward-Hopkins (), Vivien Fisch-Romito, Sascha Nick and Emile Chevrel
Additional contact information
Joel Millward-Hopkins: University of Lausanne (UNIL), Quartier Centre
Vivien Fisch-Romito: University of Lausanne (UNIL), Quartier Centre
Sascha Nick: Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL)
Emile Chevrel: ETH Zurich

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract The idea that human needs should be secured for all people is largely uncontroversial, and recent research demonstrates that decent living standards could be secured for all, globally, with far lower energy and resource use than today. However, how the energy requirements of decent living vary across populations is poorly understood – particularly in high-income countries—and important questions regarding inequality remain unexplored. Here we show how, with a fairer distribution of energy, Switzerland could dramatically reduce energy consumption while securing wellbeing for all. We advance previous work on energy and wellbeing by decomposing an established net-zero scenario into the energy required to support human needs, and that related to affluence or excess. We estimate decent living energy in 2050 at 19.5 gigajoules per capita (18–26 gigajoules in varying subnational contexts), making it only ~13% of Switzerland’s 2019 energy footprint, and ~23% of that projected in the net-zero scenario. This highlights the theoretical potential for affluent countries to move towards a more just, egalitarian global distribution of energy and resource consumption, while securing wellbeing for their own citizens.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59276-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-59276-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59276-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().