Toward achieving persistent behavior change in household water conservation.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Vivek
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8214704 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Ensuring a nation's long term water supply requires the use of both supply-sided approaches such as water augmentation through water recycling, and demand-sided approaches such as water conservation. Conservation behavior can only be increased if the key drivers of such behavior are understood. The aim of this study is to reveal the main drivers from a comprehensive pool of hypothesized factors. An empirical study was conducted with 3094 Australians. Data was analyzed using multivariate linear regression analysis and decision trees to determine which factors best predict self-reported water conservation behavior. Two key factors emerge: high level of pro-environmental behavior; and pro-actively seeking out information about water. A number of less influential factors are also revealed. Public communication strategy implications are derived.
| S-EPMC3370648 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We test and compare different incentives in motivating water conservation using a randomized controlled trial. In a field experiment carried out with Singaporean households, regular feedback was given, with informative, normative and monetary incentives provided to different groups. Evidence shows that all households saved an average of 4 Litres of water per person per day, with no difference in treatment effect found across various groups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the water saving effect is also found to be more significant with high baseline users, who saved up to 5.9 Litres per person per day. High baseline households also respond more positively to the non-monetary incentives.
| S-EPMC6426227 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Health care systems primarily focus on patients after they present with disease, not before. The emerging field of precision health encourages disease prevention and earlier detection by monitoring health and disease based on an individual's risk. Active participation in health care can be encouraged with continuous health-monitoring devices, providing a higher-resolution picture of human health and disease. However, the development of monitoring technologies must prioritize the collection of actionable data and long-term user engagement.
| S-EPMC5985668 | biostudies-other
Project description:Conservation science is a crisis discipline in which the results of scientific enquiry must be made available quickly to those implementing management. We assessed the extent to which scientific research published since the year 2000 in 20 conservation science journals is publicly available. Of the 19,207 papers published, 1,667 (8.68%) are freely downloadable from an official repository. Moreover, only 938 papers (4.88%) meet the standard definition of open access in which material can be freely reused providing attribution to the authors is given. This compares poorly with a comparable set of 20 evolutionary biology journals, where 31.93% of papers are freely downloadable and 7.49% are open access. Seventeen of the 20 conservation journals offer an open access option, but fewer than 5% of the papers are available through open access. The cost of accessing the full body of conservation science runs into tens of thousands of dollars per year for institutional subscribers, and many conservation practitioners cannot access pay-per-view science through their workplace. However, important initiatives such as Research4Life are making science available to organizations in developing countries. We urge authors of conservation science to pay for open access on a per-article basis or to choose publication in open access journals, taking care to ensure the license allows reuse for any purpose providing attribution is given. Currently, it would cost $51 million to make all conservation science published since 2000 freely available by paying the open access fees currently levied to authors. Publishers of conservation journals might consider more cost effective models for open access and conservation-oriented organizations running journals could consider a broader range of options for open access to nonmembers such as sponsorship of open access via membership fees.
| S-EPMC4241051 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper proposes a knowledge-based decision-making system for energy bill assessment and competitive energy consumption analysis for energy savings. As humans have a tendency toward comparison between peers and self-groups, the same concept of competitive behavior is utilized to design knowledge-based decision-making systems. A total of 225 house monthly energy consumption datasets are collected for Maharashtra state, along with a questionnaire-based survey that includes socio-demographic information, household appliances, family size, and some other parameters. After data collection, the pre-processing technique is applied for data normalization, and correlation technique-based key features are extracted. These features are used to classify different house categories based on consumption. A knowledge-based system is designed based on historical datasets for future energy consumption prediction and comparison with actual usage. These comparative studies provide a path for knowledgebase system design to generate monthly energy utilization reports for significant behavior changes for energy savings. Further, Linear Programming and Genetic Algorithms are used to optimize energy consumption for different household categories based on socio-demographic constraints. This will also benefit the consumers with an electricity bill evaluation range (i.e., normal, high, or very high) and find the energy conservation potential (kWh) as well as a cost-saving solution to solve real-world complex electricity conservation problem.
| S-EPMC11282066 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Generalized attitudes toward authority and justice are often conceptualized as individual differences that are resistant to enduring change. However, across two field experiments with Chinese factory workers and American university staff, small adjustments to people's experience of participation in the workplace shifted these attitudes one month later. Both experiments randomly assigned work groups to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for six weeks, in which the supervisor stepped aside and workers discussed problems, ideas, and goals regarding their work (vs. a status quo meeting). Across 97 work groups and 1,924 workers, participatory meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and to be more willing to participate in political, social, and familial decision-making. These findings provide rare experimental evidence of the theoretical predictions regarding participatory democracy: that local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and empowerment.
| S-EPMC7250830 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A school-based experiment was conducted in the Brazilian Amazon to examine the effects of passively received information versus active elaboration on the 'perceptions' of jaguars (Panthera onca) among students, and the effects of information communicated via illustrated book on those perceptions among student's parents. Books distributed via school decreased fathers' perceptions of social acceptance of jaguar killing, but the same books distributed via a conservation organization did not. This suggests that fathers were influenced not only by the information explicitly conveyed in the content of books, but also by the implicit message that jaguar conservation was socially supported. Elaboration alone produced more persistent effects than information alone, but some negative attitudes were reinforced. Information and elaboration combined created stronger and more enduring effects than either intervention alone. These findings are important in designing interventions for our coexistence with jaguars and other charismatic species worldwide.
| S-EPMC7028835 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How does specific information about contamination in a household's drinking water affect water handling behavior? We randomly split a sample of households in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. The treatment group observed a contamination test of the drinking water in their own household storage vessel; while they were waiting for their results, they were also provided with a list of actions that they could take to remedy contamination if they tested positive. The control group received no test or guidance. The drinking water of nearly 90% of tested households showed evidence of contamination by fecal bacteria. They reacted by purchasing more of their water from commercial sources but not by making more time-intensive adjustments. Providing salient evidence of risk increases demand for commercial clean water.
| S-EPMC3391047 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Deep-red persistent luminescence (PersL) materials have promising applications in fluorescence labeling and tracking. PersL spectral range and PersL duration are considered to be the key factors driving the development of high-performance deep-red PersL materials. To address these two key issues, the performance of PersL materials was continually optimized by doping with cations (Si4+ and Al3+ ions), relying on the material of Li2ZnGe3O8:Cr3+ from the previous work of our group, and a 4.8-fold increase in PersL radiation spectrum intensity and more than twice the PersL duration was achieved (PersL duration up to 47 h). Ultimately, the obtained PersL materials are used to demonstrate their potential use in multi-level anti-counterfeiting, tracking and localization, respectively. This study provides a unique and novel entry point for achieving high-performance PersL materials by optimizing the PersL material host to modulate the electronic structure.
| S-EPMC9782221 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Climate change is expected to impact ecosystems directly, such as through shifting climatic controls on species ranges, and indirectly, for example through changes in human land use that may result in habitat loss. Shifting patterns of agricultural production in response to climate change have received little attention as a potential impact pathway for ecosystems. Wine grape production provides a good test case for measuring indirect impacts mediated by changes in agriculture, because viticulture is sensitive to climate and is concentrated in Mediterranean climate regions that are global biodiversity hotspots. Here we demonstrate that, on a global scale, the impacts of climate change on viticultural suitability are substantial, leading to possible conservation conflicts in land use and freshwater ecosystems. Area suitable for viticulture decreases 25% to 73% in major wine producing regions by 2050 in the higher RCP 8.5 concentration pathway and 19% to 62% in the lower RCP 4.5. Climate change may cause establishment of vineyards at higher elevations that will increase impacts on upland ecosystems and may lead to conversion of natural vegetation as production shifts to higher latitudes in areas such as western North America. Attempts to maintain wine grape productivity and quality in the face of warming may be associated with increased water use for irrigation and to cool grapes through misting or sprinkling, creating potential for freshwater conservation impacts. Agricultural adaptation and conservation efforts are needed that anticipate these multiple possible indirect effects.
| S-EPMC3637704 | biostudies-literature