Quantifying the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on household water consumption patterns in England

Date published

2021-02-18

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Nature Research (part of Springer Nature)

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Article

ISSN

2059-7037

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Citation

Abu-Bakar H, Williams L, Hallett SH. (2021) Quantifying the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on household water consumption patterns in England. npj Clean Water, Volume 4, 2021, Article number 13

Abstract

The COVID-19 lockdown has instigated significant changes in household behaviours across a variety of categories including water consumption, which in the south and east regions of England is at an all-time high. We analysed water consumption data from 11,528 households over 20 weeks from January 2020, revealing clusters of households with distinctive temporal patterns. We present a data-driven household water consumer segmentation characterising households’ unique consumption patterns and we demonstrate how the understanding of the impact of these patterns of behaviour on network demand during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown can improve the accuracy of demand forecasting. Our results highlight those groupings with the highest and lowest impact on water demand across the network, revealing a significant quantifiable change in water consumption patterns during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The implications of the study to urban water demand forecasting strategies are discussed, along with proposed future research directions

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Github

Keywords

Water resources, Hydrology

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Attribution 4.0 International

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