Conserving for the common good: Preferences for water conservation policies during a severe drought in Northern California

During the 2011–2017 drought in California, water providers used a variety of demand-side management (DSM) policies to successfully reduce water consumption by over 20%. Unfortunately, because utilities used numerous conservation policies simultaneously, little is known about support for specific policies—specifically, an untested water-budgeting policy wherein utilities gave households an allotment of water and charged higher prices for water used in excess of the budget. California recently legislated mandatory long-term reductions in water usage. It is therefore critical to obtain a better understanding of which policies, including water budgeting, have strongest public support, and to understand how the drought experience changed residents' water use behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, habits, and personal capabilities surrounding conservation. This work surveyed individuals residing in northern California, the “North State,” during a period of severe drought. We used best-worst scaling to determine households’ preferences for DSM policies; asked households how their water use behaviors changed; and evaluated psychological attitudes toward drought and water conservation. Results show the vast majority of households changed their water use behaviors during the drought. Over two-thirds of respondents never exceeded their water budgets and said they would continue to conserve after the state lifted conservation requirements. Respondents preferred water budgets relative to more familiar DSM policies, a result with implications for forecasting future water demand. Last, our survey finds only minor differences in policy preferences for respondents with different demographics and attitudes toward water use, even for variables (e.g., income) that previous literature has found to have disparate welfare effects across users.