With an increasing world population and changing lifestyles, there is a relentless demand for water including for domestic water supplies. In order to manage water demand better, the amount of water used for domestic purposes must be estimated. A number of methods exist such as the micro-components method, which is recommended by the UK Environment Agency. Microsimulation of synthetic households is also used for demand estimation, which is an area of research that has a tradition in the School of Geography, University of Leeds. This research project follows in this tradition but extends the work by adding a behavioural component through information collected via a survey. Microsimulation is used to create a synthetic household population for the city of Leeds, which is the study area for this research. Using a Domestic Consumption Monitor (DCM) from Yorkshire Water, which contains the water consumption of a sample of households, water use is matched to the synthetic population to produce baseline demand for the city, which equates to 106 million litres per day or 148 litres per person per day, which approximates the UK average. The research then involved designing and administering a behavioural survey, which was informed by a review of other surveys that have been undertaken in the UK. The survey of more than 1,000 individuals was found to contain a representative sample by housing type and metered versus non-metered houses when compared to Leeds and England. Moreover, the number of water ecologists and water utilitarians was also evenly distributed. The results of the survey showed a number of findings regarding water conservation behaviour and measures that might encourage conservation. For example, water efficient showerheads, water displacement devices in a cistern, installing a water butt, installing a dual/low flush toilet and not washing food and vegetables under a tap are all behaviours that people would adopt in the future. The survey was then used to calculate the likelihood or probability that households would adopt a particular water conservation behaviour, disaggregated by different demographic variables such as housing type, tenure, age and social economic group. These probabilities formed the basis of scenarios in which the water savings from a particular behaviour were applied to the synthetic household population to determine overall water savings by ward and for the city of Leeds as a whole. Scenarios involving a single behavioural change and multiple behaviours together were investigated. A sensitivity analysis was applied to these results to consider over-estimation in both the probabilities of likely adoption of a particular behaviour in the future and the amount of water that would be saved by adopting the behaviour. The results showed that the maximum possible savings under the most optimistic multi-behavioural scenario is 30%. Given a more realistic scenario of adoption of the three most likely behaviours from the survey, the maximum potential savings are on the order of 7%.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:581978 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Sadek, Eran Sadek Said Md |
| Publisher | University of Leeds |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0103 seconds