Environmental impact of Swiss household consumption, and estimated income rebound effects: Rebound Research Report 2

Abstract

Household consumption has an important influence on the environmental impact of a society. This research report introduces a method how the Swiss income and expenditure survey, which is designed mainly to get information about the households’ spending patterns, can be used to also retrieve information about the environmental impact of the households. As environmental pressure we focus on energy demand, and, derived therefrom, greenhouse gas emissions. Therewith we gain a database which does not only describe expenditure of households, but also the functional units of their consumption and the corresponding environmental impact. In this research report we evaluate and derive, on the basis of this database, the marginal consumption, and its environmental impact for Swiss households. This result can be used to estimate a possible income rebound (income rebound describes the increasing household impact because of increasing expenditure enabled money saved through efficiency improvements or “greener” consumption). However, this database provides the basis for a multitude of other analysis, for instance the evaluation of the environmental impact of households over time, the differences between the household types, over living areas and so forth. Since the household consumption is connected to LCA processes also different environmental impacts of household consumptions can be assessed. We focus on greenhouse gas emissions expressed in CO2 equivalents (adopting greenhouse warming potentials for the 100 year timeframe from IPCC [2007]); other assessment methods like the Eco indicator 99, Cumulative Energy Demand or Ecological Scarcity 2006 would be equally possible as well. After discussing the new method and derived results, we close with an outlook on possible improvements of this method and further development of the research on the ecological footprint of the households.