Abstract
More than one billion people will face water scarcity within the next ten years due to climate change and unsustainable water usage, and this number is only expected to grow exponentially in the future. At current water use rates, supply-side demand management is no longer an effective way to combat water scarcity. Instead, many municipalities and water agencies are looking to demand-side solutions to prevent major water loss. While changing conservation behavior is one demand-based strategy, there is a growing movement toward the adoption of water conservation technology as a way to solve water resource depletion. Installing technology into one’s household requires additional costs and motivation, creating a gap between the overall potential households that could adopt this technology, and how many actually do. This study identified and modeled a variety of demographic and household characteristics, social network influence, and external factors such as water price and rebate policy to see their effect on residential water conservation technology adoption. Using Agent-based Modeling and data obtained from the City of Miami Beach, the coupled effects of these factors were evaluated to examine the effectiveness of different pathways towards the adoption of more water conservation technologies. The results showed that income growth and water pricing structure, more so than any of the demographic or building characteristics, impacted household adoption of water conservation technologies. The results also revealed that the effectiveness of rebate programs depends on conservation technology cost and the affluence of the community. Rebate allocation did influence expensive technology adoption, with the potential to increase the adoption rate by 50%. Additionally, social network connections were shown to have an impact on the rate of adoption independent of price strategy or rebate status. These findings will lead the way for municipalities and other water agencies to more strategically implement interventions to encourage household technology adoption based on the characteristics of their communities.
Highlights
Water is undeniably necessary, supporting 7.4 billion people and over 8.7 billion species of life
Unlike studies that focus on residential water use behaviors [21], conservation technology effectiveness [22,23], and demand projection [24,25], the current study investigated how changes in different mechanisms can affect the adoption rate of conservation technology
Because the scope of water conservation is so vast, with both behavioral and technological possibilities, this study focused on water conservation technology adoption conservation as a means of resolving problems with water scarcity
Summary
Water is undeniably necessary, supporting 7.4 billion people and over 8.7 billion species of life. Despite there being an immediate need for households to begin conserving water, there is limited knowledge within the scientific community on the reasons people adopt water conservation practices in the first place. Water conservation encompasses both behavioral conservation as well as technology adoption. In the following sub-sections, some of the studies on residential water conservation and technology adoption were used for identifying various influencing mechanisms and factors. Recent studies in this field have contributed thoroughly to water management and the understandings of household influence on water conservation technology, there is currently little to no research assessing all of these mechanisms and factors at once. The remainder of this section summarizes the various mechanisms and factors affecting the water conservation technology adoption of households
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