The decline of water consumption in Spanish cities: structural and contingent factors

ABSTRACT

As cities will concentrate most of the world’s population and economic activities, so urban water demand will account for a large proportion of global water demand in the future. In contrast, recent empirical evidence indicates that water consumption in many cities of the developed world is declining. In this article, this decline in consumption is studied for the major Spanish cities, and some of the drivers of this decline (economic, technological and behavioural) are explored. Contingent events such as droughts and economic crises may intensify the decline in consumption, as shown for the case of Barcelona.

KEYWORDS:

• Water
• cities
• declining consumptions
• impacts
• Spain
• Barcelona

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Professors Asit Biswas and Cecilia Tortajada for the kind invitation to participate in the workshop ‘Managing Domestic and Industrial Water Demands’ organized by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, in December 2018. Part of this research was funded by the Instituto Interuniversitario de Geografía of the University of Alicante, Spain, and by the Spanish CICYT (grant no. CSO2015-65182-C2-1-P). I also want to thank my colleagues Antonio Rico, María Hernandez, Alvaro Morote and especially Hug March for fruitful discussions on this topic. Finally, comments, suggestions and criticisms by two anonymous referees and by the editor have contributed significantly to improve the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CICYT (Spain) [CSO2015-65182-C2-1-P].