Abstract
Whilst the problematic of energy poverty has become an important topic in research and policy-making in the Global North in general and in Europe especially, there exists almost no work on energy poverty in Switzerland.This exploratory work aims to perform the first spatial analysis on energy poverty in Switzerland by constructing an energy poverty vulnerability index that is composed of data of the Federal Register of Buildings and Dwellings (RBD) as well as the Swiss-SEP (socioeconomic position). Besides the implementation of the indicator on a national level, the situation regarding energy poverty vulnerability is analysed on a higher resolution for the City of Zurich. Furthermore, this work assesses the suitability and quality of the available data to analyse energy poverty in Switzerland and evaluates the implementation of energy poverty related policy measures. The spatial analysis shows that on a national level, households in rural regions have a higher risk to be affected by energy poverty than in cities. Further, households in mountainous regions are affected by a higher vulnerability of energy poverty due to colder climate. The vulnerability of Zurich appeared rather low at a coarse resolution. However, the visualization of the data on a smaller scale revealed big differences within the city boundaries, with a rather high energy poverty vulnerability index towards the outskirts of the city. The RBD and Swiss-SEP allow to perform an analysis on a neighborhood-scale on energy poverty vulnerability, but some drawbacks regarding data quality were identified. It was found that in Switzerland hardly any measures against energy poverty specifically are taken, which needs to be reconsidered. Future work to improve the indicator is proposed.