Urban residential water usage in response to climate variability in China

Abstract While it has been shown that climate change poses a significant threat to China’s supply of freshwater resources, it is unclear if household water consumption – the fastest growing source of water demand in China – would also be affected. To fill this knowledge gap, we use a novel dataset from over 40,000 Chinese households, spanning nine years and ten provinces to examine the relationship between daily household water usage and climate variability. We find that water usage have an increasing marginal relationship with daily temperature. Heterogeneity analyses along dimensions of background environmental conditions and socioeconomic groups reveal that household are likely to substitute between water and electricity to cope with high heat. By systematically aggregating the dataset to different temporal scales, we also find evidence of changing behaviors where over time, households are using increasingly more water to cope with high-temperature days. In all, after feeding our results into climate projection models, it is estimated that household water usage will increase by around 4%-29% under RCP8.5. Our findings are especially relevant for water-scarce countries such as China as well as developing countries where water is a cheaper and more accessible resource to cope with heat.