Promotion of residential water conservation measures in South Africa: the role of water-saving equipment

Abstract

In many urban settings around the world the severity of water scarcity has induced changes in household behavior, leading to reduction in the volume of water demanded. One of the most widely used strategies is the adoption of water-saving equipment that collects, stores and eventually treats wastewater from various sources within the household. This paper investigates the factors that drive adoption of water-saving equipment in Cape Town, South Africa, following the catastrophic "Day Zero" water crisis in 2018. First, the paper develops a disaggregated technology diffusion model. Second, we make use of choice experiments to determine the attribute levels and socioeconomic characteristics that influence adoption of watersaving equipment in urban communities in South Africa. Data collected from a sample of 465 representative households in Cape Town are used in a choice modelling framework. Latent class analysis (LCA) is compared with both multinomial logit and conditional logit models to estimate marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for adoption of water-saving equipment. The LCA identified three household classes with distinct preferences, suggesting divergence in adoption of water-saving equipment.

Connectedness to Water as a Predictor of Household Participation in Water Resources Conservation in Singida Municipality, Tanzania

“…Healthy problems related to water borne diseases were also identified as the reason for households to conserve water. This fact is confirmed by Thiam et al, (2021) when they studied the promotion of residential water conservation measures using latent class analysis and multinomial and conditional logit using a sample of 465 households in South Africa, which found that females were very sensitive to conserving water, stating that they are more vulnerable to diseases in poor hygiene environments as compared to Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC) males. In Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a quantitative study on water conservation attitudes by Iftikhar et al, (2021), applied the theory of reasoned action and planned behaviour to a sample of 399 respondents using reliability analysis and revealed that, with high education, there is a positive relationship between attitudes and behaviour to conserve water resources.…”

Research on the optimization of cooperative advertising strategy in the promotion of water-saving products based on differential game

“…in different regions with different economic levels by questionnaire surveys and empirical analysis. The study found that there are four main influencing factors, including attitude characteristics, environmental problems, socio-economic characteristics and attribute characteristics of watersaving products (Millock & Nauges, 2010;Grafton et al, 2011;Thiam et al, 2021). In terms of promotion policies for water-saving products, as early as the 1990s, the Goleta area of California adopted ultra-low-water consumption flush toilets to replace old-style toilets, and distributed 35,000 low-water-consuming showers to the local people for free to prolong the service life of the water supply system (Dunham et al, 1995).…”

Consumer Preference for Attributes of Single-Use and Multi-Use Plastic Shopping Bags in Cape Town: A Choice Experiment Approach

“…Following the literature, we begin by estimating the utility with the conditional logit model (CLM), which assumes that each ε ij is independently and identically distributed (IID) with Weibull distribution, and consistent with the independence of an irrelevant alternative (IIA) [18,27,58]. The implication here is that the probability of choosing between options is not affected by other alternatives.…”

“…Apart from the CLM and RPL models, latent class analysis (LCA) is another econometric technique that is commonly used in the environmental economics literature to model preferences [27,58]. The advantage of using LCA is that we can recover unobserved classes in the data.…”

“…The underlying argument supported by economic stylized facts is that consumers who belong to the same class (such as education, income) tend to have the same behavioural patterns [63,64]. LCA is then used to account for class heterogeneity in addition to preference heterogeneity while at the same time releasing the restrictive assumption of the IID of error terms [58]. Our objective of this analysis is to account for preference heterogeneity only as opposed to class heterogeneity, which makes the CLM sufficient for our analysis.…”