WATER ETHICS

Prepared by: Dam Ha Luong Thanh

The increasing world population and climate change are major concerns for the supply of
water needs. Understanding water user’s perception and behavior is extremely important,
which can help in developing strategies to reduce the environmental impacts of resource
use, e.g., water.
In reality, as reported from previous study, people always think that they have positive
perception about water consumption, that they are interested in water-saving actions,
however, they are actually lacking awareness about their actual water consumption.
In this conception, water consumption can be divided into indoor use (drinking, personal
hygiene, kitchen use, and laundry) and outdoor use (vegetable garden, livestock, and
house and yard cleaning). And there are several factors that can influence the perception
of people to their water consumption, especially the demographic information as gender,
age, education, location, and income, etc. For example, as reported, females and elderly
users easily overestimate their water consumption compared with males and younger
users, people with high income and educational levels easily underestimate their own
water consumption, they usually have a number of appliances that consume water for
operation (washing machine, solar water heater, etc.) and outdoor activities, such as
household and yard cleaning and vegetable and garden watering. They are considered to
consume more water than the other groups and are not concerned with their water bills,
thus leading to water consumption underestimation. Hence, it is clear to be seen that, the
concern that mostly impacted to the amount of water consumption of each people is
relating to their social economic situation, most of them reported that they try to reduce
the water consumption because they want to save for money, and just very few of them
toward to the water resource conservation.
That is the reason why in many regions and countries, beside propagandizing people to
save water and use water efficiently, putting the water saving action in school activities,
and even give policies and law regarding water use efficiency, etc. as the ways to help
people have better awareness about water consumption, the government decided to give
high expense of water, the first purpose is to help people to perceive that water resource
is extremely valuable, and influence them to reduce their water consumption habits as the
direct way to decrease the amount of current water consumption.
In conclusion, changing a behavior depends first on a person’s perception. It can happen
quickly and fast if we achieve to ‘push the right button’. And it might not always be to
the one way we think it is (or have been pushing for many years). Thus, if we want to
achieve behavioral change, we first need to understand much better how people think and
act, and then critically assess our work. Put simply, first we need to change our behavior
before others will change theirs.