(College Station)—As predicting future urban water use becomes more complex, a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station study could help lessen the burden facing city planners nationwide.
A federal grant from the U.S. Geological Survey will help fund the research, which is anticipated to reveal new trends and opportunities in water use.
Findings will be used to improve planning models, said Ron Griffin, Experiment Station economist. The results will help provide a better understanding of what drives water use in urban environments.
"Residential, commercial and industrial water consumers have a lot of options they can and do exercise," he said. "They modify their behavior, their equipment, their technologies and even where or if they conduct their activities. By compiling data on water use and its determining factors across the U.S., we want to perform statistical analyses that go beyond the simplistic idea that every person requires 100 gallons per day or every $1,000 of output requires X gallons."
The effect of rates on water use is another aspect of the research. These have an important "public function in signaling rising scarcity to consumers," Griffin said.
"For policy makers to take advantage of that signaling capacity nationwide as water gets increasingly scarce, they're going to want to know more about the linkages," he said.
Some of the current problems planners encounter is that most planning tools aren't responsive to new policy options, Griffin said.
"For example, most domestic water use forecasts employ a single driver, such as population, thereby limiting planning actions to meet a population's water requirements, or conceivably, trying to limit population," he said.
For water planning activities to progress farther, Griffin said, "existing data should be examined for the insights it may yield about demand determination."
Water rates, meter charges and other use data will be collected from several hundred cities, helping to reveal what is expected to be a "diversity of water rates across the nation."
Final data from the two-year study will be available at http://waterecon.tamu.edu and
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