Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories form the basis of evidence-based climate change planning across the local, regional, national, and international levels. In this letter, we present a consumption-based GHG accounting approach for estimating the carbon footprint (CF) comprising direct and indirect emissions of households in Switzerland for 2008, 2011, and 2014 and examine the impact of urbanity and socioeconomic variables on these estimates. The CF model used herein couples regionalized household budget surveys (HBS) with environmentally-extended input-output analysis (EEIOA). We provide greater insight into the obscure process of combining bottom-up consumption data (i.e., HBS) and top-down input-output tables (IOT) in a CF model. The findings show that urban households tend to have lower direct emissions than rural households whereas indirect emissions are higher. Therefore, the nature of both direct and indirect emissions should be considered when evaluating the role of urbanization, as each has a different focus. Overall, our results indicate that income is the most important driver of household total cf Some local features specific to Switzerland have also been found to be important in shaping the relationship between the household CF and its drivers. We argue that household composition should be the focal point for future study of CF mitigation in Switzerland, and that policies should prioritise measures that target consumer behaviour and lifestyles, rather than solely focus on improving physical infrastructure and adopting new technologies.

Action-oriented, transformative, and transdisciplinary approaches are increasingly heralded as promising tools that enable researchers not only to produce new knowledge about a situation, but also to actively engage in tackling it; however, such approaches raise critical questions about the methodological implications and conflicts involved in pursuing multiple objectives concurrently. This article seeks to advance this debate by examining the methodological implications of pursuing both knowledge production-oriented (epistemic) and action-oriented (transformative) objectives in urgent and uncertain situations. It asks how far a transformative mixed methods research design can leverage the potential of research to achieve multiple objectives in times of crisis. This methodological inquiry is based on a transformative mixed methods study on housing conditions and well-being which was initiated during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Switzerland. The study was composed of a country-wide survey, mobile crowdsourcing, interviews and Citizen Think Tanks. The results of this methodological reflection illustrate how this research design made it possible to (i) explore the effects of the crisis on domestic living spaces, (ii) engage with the crisis in a joint research space, and (iii) stimulate empowerment through reflection and mutual learning. These insights suggest the multidimensional orientation of the transformative mixed methods approach is appropriate for acting upon urgent crises. However, it challenges core methodological values and research constellations including (i) tackling unequal engagement opportunities, (ii) navigating social and epistemic control, and (iii) paying attention to situatedness and positionality. The article concludes that, in anticipation of future crises, favorable conditions for multi-targeted, collaborative research need to be fostered, both on the institutional and on personal levels. These conditions should enable fast and adequate team formation, as well as reflection and negotiation of positionalities, and divergent interests and objectives, of both scientists and citizens.

The physical characteristics of an urban system are typically heterogeneously expressed, creating distinct neighbourhoods shaped by specific local features. Hence, spatially explicit expression of sustainability across the urban system is expected and should not be ignored. In this paper, we present an empirical study that explicitly accounts for the spatial heterogeneity of local-scale urban form features and the significance of a neighbourhood in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Our work first established a typology of urban form features, followed by the definition of local-scale functional neighbourhood boundaries using well-established criteria across the study area. An assessment of the sustainability of the resulting neighbourhoods revealed that significant differences can be observed between the different neighbourhood types across various components of urban sustainability. These results highlight the relevance, and argue for the importance, of incorporating local-scale approaches for more effective urban sustainability assessment to support urban planning and policymaking in the transition towards sustainability.