Publications by Sascha Nick | EPFL Graph Search

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

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 ene ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Systems perspectives on transforming Swiss housing by 2040: wellbeing, shared spaces, sufficiency, and de-sprawl

Sascha Nick

The Swiss habitat-buildings and related mobility-faces multiple interconnected problems which can only be solved together. These include high energy consumption, significant climate impact, excessive material use with low circularity, accelerating urban sp ...

2024

Demand for low-quality offsets by major companies undermines climate integrity of the voluntary carbon market

Sascha Nick

Most companies include carbon offsets in their net-zero strategy. However, many offset projects are poor quality and fail to reduce emissions as claimed. Here we focus on the twenty companies retiring the most offsets from the voluntary carbon market over ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

RE-BD AR2024. Accelerating renewable energy development while enhancing biodiversity protection in Switzerland

Christophe Ballif, Sascha Nick

RE-BD AR2024, the 2024 Assessment Report on Renewable Energy and Biodiversity, addresses the critical balance between expanding renewable energy (RE) and better protecting biodiversity in Switzerland, with a special focus on the Alpine regions. It is the r ...

CLIMACT - EPFL - UNIL2024

Action Levers towards Sustainable Wellbeing: Re-Thinking Negative Emissions, Sufficiency, Deliberative Democracy

Sascha Nick

Systems theory defines leverage points as places to intervene in order to change a system. Points with high impact on system behavior are notoriously hard to act upon, and indeed most policy intervention is based at the lowest level (#12 in Donella Meadows ...

EPFL2023

Swiss Negative Emissions Fund – paying for Net Zero

Philippe Thalmann, Sascha Nick

In this paper, we propose setting up a fund to finance the removal of all Swiss territorial GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from 2030. The fund will accelerate decarbonization and help reach annual net zero emissions around 2040, and then progressively remo ...

E4S Enterprise for Society2022

Towards true climate neutrality for global aviation: a Negative Emissions Fund for Airlines

Philippe Thalmann, Sascha Nick

What would it take for aviation to become climate-neutral by 2050? We develop and model a trajectory for aviation to reduce its CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050, down to a level where all residual emissions can be removed from the atmosphere without crowding o ...

2022