Changes in water consumption linked to heavy news media coverage of extreme climatic events.

ABSTRACT: Public awareness of water- and drought-related issues is an important yet relatively unexplored component of water use behavior. To examine this relationship, we first quantified news media coverage of drought in California from 2005 to 2015, a period with two distinct droughts; the later drought received unprecedentedly high media coverage, whereas the earlier drought did not, as the United States was experiencing an economic downturn coinciding with a historic presidential election. Comparing this coverage to Google search frequency confirmed that public attention followed news media trends. We then modeled single-family residential water consumption in 20 service areas in the San Francisco Bay Area during the same period using geospatially explicit data and including news media coverage

SUBMITTER: Quesnel KJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5656424 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature