Assessing the Impacts of Urban Water-Use Restrictions at the District Level: Case Study of California’s Drought Mandate
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146, Issue 5
Abstract
This paper estimates feasible water savings for a sample of nine urban water districts in California during the height of the 2012–2016 drought, just prior to the implementation of mandatory water-use reductions, using household production theory and stochastic frontier analysis. Estimates of feasible savings are compared to mandated reductions and actual reductions in each district. Although the mandated reductions were generally feasible, the results reported here show that they had asymmetric impacts across districts and tended to impose larger burdens on some disadvantaged groups.
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Data Availability Statement
The data supporting this paper compose a large household-level data set that includes monthly water consumption records and household characteristics considered by the water districts to be confidential information. The code generated during the study is available from the corresponding author by request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, Hatch Project CA-R-ENS-5087-H.
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 5 • May 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 22, 2018
Accepted: Aug 14, 2019
Published online: Feb 20, 2020
Published in print: May 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jul 20, 2020
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