Li Dongyue, Engel Ruth A, Ma Xiaoyu, Porse Erik, Kaplan Jonathan D, Margulis Steven A, Lettenmaier Dennis P
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1524, United States.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, United States.
Environ Sci Technol Lett. 2021 Feb 10;8(5):431-436. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00979. eCollection 2021 May 11.
In response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments instituted "stay-at-home" orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The resulting changes in work and life routines had the potential to substantially perturb typical patterns of urban water use. We present here an analysis of how these pandemic responses affected California's urban water consumption. Using water demand modeling that fuses an integrated water use database, we first simulated the water use in a business-as-usual (non-pandemic) scenario for essentially all urban areas in California. We then subtracted the business-as-usual water use from the actual use to isolate the changes caused solely by the pandemic response. We found that the pandemic response decreased California's urban water use by 7.9%, which can be largely attributed to an 11.2% decrease in the commercial, industrial, and institutional sector that more than offset a 1.4% increase in the residential sector. The influence of the stay-at-home practices on urban water use is slightly stronger than the combined influences of all non-pandemic factors. This study covers both metropolitans and suburbs; therefore, the results could also be useful for analysis of the impacts of COVID-19 on water use in other urban areas.
为应对新冠疫情的爆发，许多政府发布了“居家”令以防止冠状病毒传播。由此导致的工作和生活日常的变化有可能极大地扰乱城市用水的典型模式。我们在此呈现对这些疫情应对措施如何影响加利福尼亚州城市用水的分析。通过融合综合用水数据库的用水需求建模，我们首先模拟了加利福尼亚州基本所有城市地区在照常营业（非疫情）情景下的用水情况。然后我们从实际用水量中减去照常营业的用水量，以分离出仅由疫情应对措施导致的变化。我们发现，疫情应对措施使加利福尼亚州的城市用水量减少了7.9%，这在很大程度上归因于商业、工业和公共机构部门11.2%的降幅，该降幅抵消了居民部门1.4%的增幅。居家措施对城市用水的影响略强于所有非疫情因素的综合影响。本研究涵盖了大城市和郊区；因此，研究结果也可能有助于分析新冠疫情对其他城市地区用水的影响。
