The Lemanic Panel, a five-year monitoring of populations’ lifestyles—focus on the first wave: recruitment phase, mobility survey and GPS tracking

Abstract The urgency of climate change is such that public policies need to be radically reoriented. Clean technologies and digital optimization will go some way toward achieving this. But if we are to achieve the targets set by COP21 as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, we will also have to engage in a major transformation of our lifestyles. This concerns all spheres of activity, in particular mobility (including the questions of teleworking, business travel, etc.), housing and its energy consumption, household consumption of food and non-food products (including the question of online shopping, consumption of organic products, etc.). The article presents the research infrastructure of the “Lemanic Panel for analysis of sustainability of behaviors”, a five-year project initiated by the EPFL and starting in autumn 2022, involving a sample of over 10,000 people living in the Lake Geneva region. After presenting the set-up and its scientific interest, the article focuses on the panel’s mobility component, which includes GPS tracking. The conceptualization and implementation of Wave 1, used to recruit the panel, are presented. The same applies to GPS tracking. The weighting method is described in order to match the socio-demographic structure of the sample survey population. Three potential contributions of the Lemanic Panel are detailed, with the aim of showing the analytical potential of this innovative infrastructure in terms of its conceptualization and the data collected.