Graduate Exit Seminar- Matthew Barnett

Matthew Barnett will be presenting A Multilevel Analysis of Social, Built, and Natural Driversof Household Water Use in Northern Utah on Wednesday, April 11th at 10:00am in Kottman Hall room 385.

Communities across the American West are facing challenges managing their water resources in the face of rapid population growth and advancing climate change. Though reductions in residential water use are often targeted by water managers and public policymakers, structural factors contribute to residential water use practices, potentially minimizing the agency of individuals to reduce their household water use levels. I estimated Hierarchical Linear Models using metered residential water use data in conjunction with data from a large 2014 neighborhood survey and secondary data  to predict levels of indoor and outdoor water use for single-family detached housing across 20 Northern Utah neighborhoods. Outdoor water use was characterized by a significantly larger proportion of neighborhood-level variation than indoor use. For both indoor and outdoor water use, the attitudes, perceptions, and concerns of the respondents were largely superseded by structural factors. Indoor water use was primarily driven by household size, though some self-reported indoor conservation behaviors (such as taking fewer or shorter showers) were associated with lower use. Meanwhile, outdoor water use was found to be largely driven by built structure and the average cost of water at the household level. A significant amount of neighborhood-level variation in outdoor water use was explained by aggregated secondary water use, aggregated community association membership (i.e., homeowners associations and condominium owners associations), and the density of urban development.