Environmental Concern, Environmental Knowledge, and Residents’ Water Conservation Behavior: Evidence from China

Abstract

Water conservation represents a typical green behavior and a sustainable lifestyle. Understanding residents’ water conservation behaviors is a prerequisite for promoting more water savers. Using the snowball sampling technique, this study conducted a survey on a sample of 532 Chinese residents to investigate their water conservation behavior, i.e., reusing water in daily life. This study aims for examining psychological and knowledge factors on residents’ water conservation behavior in China using binary logistic regression. Results show that over half of the respondents (54%) have the habit of reusing water in their daily lives. Residents with stronger environmental concern and higher level of environmental knowledge are more likely to exhibit household water conservation in China. Additionally, environmental knowledge plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between environmental concern and water conservation behavior. Environmental knowledge serves as a catalyzer that facilitates the transformation from residents’ environmental concern into real water conservation behavior. Among the demographic variables, only income exerts significantly negative effect on residents’ water conservation behavior, and other variables (e.g., age and gender) fail to exert any influence on this behavior. This study contributes to the literature on environmental psychology and concludes with implications for water resource management.