Midterm impacts of a water drought experience: evaluation of consumption changes in São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

From late 2013 until the beginning of 2015, the metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil, experienced a severe water shortage. During that period, economic incentives were implemented by the regional water provider in a successful attempt to reduce water consumption. We aimed to investigate whether such incentives, as well as the experience of a scarcity period itself, had a persistent impact on consumer behaviour after the water crisis was over. This study was conducted by means of a hierarchical linear model with three levels (HLM3) to verify if the reduction effect remained in the midterm and a regression using panel data to understand which factors influenced water consumption behaviour change before, during, and after the local severe water drought. The results indicate that the average water consumption level subsequent to the rain scarcity period was significantly lower than before and that, in addition to the economic incentives, the severity of the scarcity event explained the behaviour change verified in water consumption.

Guidelines for water conservation in Brazil

“…The literature also shows that the water availability context influences people to incorporate water-saving behavior (Wang & Dong, 2017;Stone & Johnson, 2022;Sousa et al, 2022). This happens because people feel the seriousness of the situation and generally understand that they are part of the problem as well as part of the solution (Gilbertson et al, 2011), and that is why, in our framework, the context influences psychological factors.…”

“…Nevertheless, in more recent years, studies have shown that these factors alone are inconsistent in predicting environmental behaviors; thus, they have been used mainly to segment information, such as creating clusters (i.e., gathering households/inhabitants with similar characteristics) and investigating similar consumption patterns within such clusters (Wolters, 2014;Ibrahim et al, 2018;Villar-Navascués & Pérez-Morales, 2018;Rodonic, 2019;Sousa & Fouto, 2019;Ibrahim et al, 2021;Ito et al, 2021;Kumar, Sharma, Tabhani, & Otaki, 2021;Sousa, Teixeira, & Fouto, 2022). In the present literature review, socioeconomic and demographic factors were the main topic in only 8 of the 55 articles; however, variables associated with these factors were present in more than half of the studies read for this review (33 out of 55).…”

“…The experience of drought was reported as a factor that changed consumer behavior even after a drought was over (Bernardo et al, 2015;Beal et al, 2016;Wang & Dong, 2017;Sousa, Teixeira, & Fouto, 2022;Stone & Johnson, 2022). This means that during water scarcity periods, people incorporate new habits that remain even when the dry periods end.…”

“…Finally, as control municipal variable, also that varies through the years, we used municipal per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), collected from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística -IBGE, in Portuguese) database. It was used as a control variable, considered as a proxy for local income, since income has proven to be a significant factor in shaping water consumption (Sousa & Fouto, 2019;Sousa et al, 2022).…”

“…Brazil has been facing water scarcity in the last years, in different regions of the country (Sousa & Fouto, 2019;Getirana et al, 2021;Sousa et al, 2022). Yet, in Latin America and the Caribbean region, Brazil has the highest NRW level (De Santi et al, 2021).…”