Abstract
Personalised normative messages have been shown to be effective at encouraging both electricity and separately water savings. As use of this approach to promote resource savings becomes increasingly widespread, an important question is whether providing such feedback on consumption of the two resources together can yield reductions in both areas. In a field experiment with over 200,000 households in the Middle East, we send households personalised normative messages regarding both their water and electricity consumption on a monthly basis. This intervention saw a statistically significant reduction of around 1.2% for electricity but not for water consumption. Furthermore, we test different ways of concurrently presenting normative messages of both water and energy, including presenting it as a combined eco score. Local treatment effects of these were around 1.2% reduction. Our findings contribute towards nexus thinking around how (not) to concurrently achieve energy and water savings using normative feedback.
Highlights
The past decade has seen the widespread diffusion of technologies that collect fine-grained, and in some cases real-time, data on con sumption of two critical resources: energy and water [1,2]
We present the first work to explore the effec tiveness of concurrently presenting households with personalised normative feedback on two areas of environmentally significant consumption: electricity and water
The intervention delivered a 1.9% reduction in electricity consumption over a 12-month period, when looking at the local average treatment effect (LATE) using email open rate of the wing treatment, or 1.2% when looking at all treatments combined
Summary
The past decade has seen the widespread diffusion of technologies that collect fine-grained, and in some cases real-time, data on con sumption of two critical resources: energy and water [1,2]. Given the widespread prevalence of personalised norm interventions in the environmental space and the evidence of spillovers between resource areas, an important question is how to combine normative messages relating to the consumption of different resources in order to yield the greatest levels of conservation across domains and maximise the messages' environmental benefits. This question is of relevance both in cases where utility companies have the opportunity to collaborate and align their normative based feedback and in situations where utility companies provide services relating to more than one resource, e.g., water and energy or energy and waste.
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