Abstract
In Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the population and water demand have nearly tripled in the last two decades. Thus, it has become critical to curtail the growing water demand. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of Abu Dhabi’s residential water demand management through the installation of water-saving fittings. The analysis of water consumption time-series data revealed that water consumption of the three water user categories was significantly different. Briefly: water-tariff exempt users consumed 95.19 m3/d/connection in 2019, followed by nationals with 5.14 m3/d/connection, and expats at 0.7 m3/d/connection. Nationals began saving water in 2011, which was earlier than the water tariff revision of 2015. In a newly developed area of Khalifa City, the water consumption of new residents was 46.0% less than that of old residents, indicating the effectiveness of water-saving fittings installed in new homes following the Housing Rules’ requirements. Then, based on the estimated number of new connections and the fittings’ saving efficiencies, we estimated that water-saving fittings contributed to 73.1% of the water savings since 2011. These results strongly recommend the introduction of an incentive or subsidy for owners of old houses to replace their outdated fittings with water-saving ones.
Highlights
Energy, water, and food resource scarcity, largely due to rapid population growth, climate change, imbalanced urbanization, and economic diversification, are today’s greatest challenges [1,2,3,4]
The nationals’ water consump100 tion decreased from 1016 to 582 LPCD (42.7% reduction), while expats decreased from 91 to 58 LPCD (36.2% reduction). These results indicated that nationals consumed about three times the global average of 180 LPCD [3], whereas the expats used less than onethird of it in 2019
(1) The residential sector consumes the largest amount of water among all water use sectors
Summary
Water, and food resource scarcity, largely due to rapid population growth, climate change, imbalanced urbanization, and economic diversification, are today’s greatest challenges [1,2,3,4]. 1 billion people are considered undernourished, while no less than 1.5 billion live outside the modern energy network [1]. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and The United Arab Emirates (UAE)) are in an arid region with limited natural water resources [5]. Developing resource-rich nations, such as the GCC countries [7], are facing several major challenges that threaten water sector sustainability because of the swift economic and population growth caused by sharp increases in oil revenues [3,5,8]
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