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Online Seminar

Urban residential water usage in response to climate variability in China

Climate change poses a significant thread to supply of scarce freshwater resources in China. However, it is unclear on how climate change would also affect water consumption – the fastest growing source of water demand in China. It is recently found that urban households water usage is the fastest growing source of water demand in China. To fill this knowledge gap, In this regard, we use a novel dataset from over 40,000 Chinese households, spanning ten years and nine provinces to examine the relationship between daily household water usage and climate variability. We find that water usage shares a non-linear relationship with daily temperature, and discover heterogeneity along dimensions of background environmental conditions and socioeconomic groups. By aggregating the dataset to different temporal scales, we also find evidence of adaptation changing behaviors where over time, households are using increasingly more water to cope with high-temperature days. In all, after feeding our results into climate projection models, it is estimated that household water usage will increase by around 5%-33% under RCP8.5.

Video Webinar - Zoom
Fri 24 July 2020
11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

Dr Jie-Sheng Tan-Soo

Dr Jie-Sheng Tan-Soo

Assistant Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

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Dr Qian Neng

Dr Qian Neng

Research Fellow, Government Agency.

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