Deriving Low-Cost, Dwelling-Level Statistics for Exploring Urban Sustainability: Income, Land Surface Temperature, Environmental Attitudes and Swimming Pool Ownership

Abstract

Improving urban sustainability requires an understanding of the determinants of resource consumption. The determinants of such consumption are poorly understood despite more than 40 years of investigation. Detailed exploration requires data at the dwelling scale. Such data are usually difficult or expensive to collect. This work derived dwelling-level statistics for each of ~ 200,000 dwellings in the city of Canberra, Australia. Swimming pool locations and size were derived from satellite imagery (a); household wealth was estimated from unimproved land value (b); summer daytime micro-climate temperature was estimated from thermal satellite imagery (c) and environmental attitudes were estimated from the interpolated percentage of Greens party votes from polling station election results (d). All four variables were correlated with residential water consumption. This work demonstrates how these explanatory variables can be derived from publicly available datasets and at low cost. It also shows their value in understanding the determinants of household water consumption.

Barriers to water use efficiency in rural and peri‐urban areas of South Africa

“…Additionally, the findings have implications for stakeholders in the water sector especially the Department of Water and Sanitation as it uncovers the social variables that promote efficiency behaviour in the rural and peri-urban environment. Talent (2020) holds that understanding water consumption patterns in cities is crucial in improving "water use efficiency".…”

“…The concept of water use efficiency has continued to gain currency empirically over the years. The growing interest can be attributed to the increasing importance of water-efficient measures in many countries (Talent, 2020) especially water-stressed countries like South Africa. Water use efficiency embodies some varied, shifting and sometimes, muddled interpretations (Anderson, 2013;Baumann et al, 1984).…”