Decarbonizing household lifestyles is a top priority for climate mitigation, particularly in high-income societies like Switzerland, where consumption-based emissions remain disproportionately high (Creuzig et al., 2018). Positive tipping points (PTPs) for sustainability—as deliberately activated mechanisms of self-reinforcing, rapid system change—offer a pathway to transforming behaviors and systemic conditions that lock in carbon-intensive lifestyles (Milkoreit, 2023). Scholars have mostly identified sensitive intervention points—where small, targeted actions can trigger PTPs and have large-scale effects in a given system—either theoretically, through expert assessments, or retrospectively, from past case studies (Farmer et al., 2019; Otto et al., 2020). However, the empirical identification of prospective interventions remains a crucial gap in the field.
This presentation introduces a novel participatory modeling framework for empirically identifying prospective intervention points, tested in a case study in the Arc Lémanique region. We carried out a transdisciplinary research process that combines an actor-centered perspective with a system-level analysis of the levers and barriers for reducing lifestyle-related emissions. First, we held a workshop with policymakers and experts to identify and prioritize context-sensitive, domain-specific interventions. Discussions revolved around statistical personas encapsulating carbon-intensive household lifestyles, built through stepwise clustering of longitudinal survey data. Second, we developed causal loop diagrams (CLDs) to model the challenges of reducing lifestyle-related emissions across food, housing, and mobility systems. The resulting CLDs were validated and enriched through participatory activities with local stakeholders to explore the cross-sectoral effects of proposed interventions and their trade-offs.
As a result of the research process, we obtained a policy mix integrating both behavioral interventions (e.g., visible role models) and structural interventions (e.g., distance-based mobility pricing). Major barriers to the effective implementation of interventions—such as governance fragmentation, political inertia, and misaligned incentives—also emerged as relevant findings. By bridging behavioral science and systems thinking, our approach advances a transdisciplinary framework capable of anticipating pathways for lifestyle decarbonization (Sharpe & Lenton, 2021), illustrating how empirical participatory research can enhance conventional PTP research approaches.
