Poor network management and the climate crisis have led to water shortages across the UK which will worsen in the coming years. According to one expert, focusing all our attention on capacity misses the point.
Professor Benjamin Gardner is a social psychologist and the co-director of the University of Surrey’s Sustainability Through Behaviour Change research programme at the Institute for Sustainability. Over the last few years, he’s also been working in the water efficiency space, researching methods which may encourage people to reduce consumption, and ‘impact’ projects aiming to ensure the UK water sector is connecting with and benefitting from behaviour change expertise.
For example, using unobtrusive shower sensor-timers to ascertain if a message asking people to take a shorter shower is more or less effective than a message encouraging people to turn off the shower when lathering up to reduce duration. We asked home some quick questions about how Britain’s beleaguered water suppliers should approach a drought crisis which remains ongoing, even after the heavens have finally started to open for many of us.
England has endured a very long and dry summer in 2025. What steps could have been taken to alleviate pressure on the system during this time?
This is a tricky one to answer, as I don’t wish to attribute ‘blame’ for steps having not been taken. However, over the past year I have led a project where we have connected with the UK water sector, to map out what needs to be done to better support people to save water.
Together with over 100 individuals working in over 60 organisations, we agreed that more work is needed to understand how consumers perceive and use water – and in particular, whether, how and why people take showers, identify and report (or fix) leaks, and use dual-flush toilets.
We also agreed that the water sector needs to be better equipped to apply insights from behavioural science – for example, water companies need to be engaging more with behavioural scientists’ skills, knowledge and expertise as one tool in the toolbox for tackling water scarcity.
Climate change has contributed to an already challenging situation, however you are making the case for a more psychological understanding of the crisis — and better appreciation for human behaviour. What does this mean?
We mean that, to encourage people to change their behaviour, we have to first understand how people think, feel and act with regards to water-based activities. Too often, water scarcity initiatives make assumptions about why people use water in the way that they do, without clear evidence to support these assumptions.
For example, if people are told that washing a car uses, say, 40 litres, a key assumption is that people can conceive of 40 litres of water, and understand that that is a significant (and unacceptable) amount of water to use. But do people interpret this information in this way? Do they think that 40 litres is a lot, or a little?
People do not have an intuitive grasp of water quantities, so such information must be communicated in more meaningful terms. Similarly, water meters can give feedback on how much water is being used, but they rarely reveal which activities are using most water – and even if they did, people may not know how to go about reducing their water consumption for certain activities. It’s important that attempts to change behaviour are based on evidence around how people think, feel and act, and how they are likely to respond to initiatives to change their behaviour.
How could the water industry ensure human behaviour is always considered moving forward, and becomes standardised within the industry’s approach to water management?
Several steps can be taken here. One is for water companies to work more closely with behavioural scientists, to ensure that state-of-the-art behavioural science can be built into attempts to support behaviour change – and to ensure that the results of any such attempts are fed back into the scientific evidence base, so we continue to develop knowledge on ‘what works’ for water efficiency.
Another step is for water sector organisations to more readily share the information that they already hold around behaviour change. In too many instances, behaviour change initiatives are trialled, the results are shared within the organisation that trialled it – and then the findings are locked away. This prevents the development of knowledge, and risks costly replications of failure. By embracing a culture of collaboration and openness, water sector stakeholders can start to work more in concert to understand and change water efficiency behaviour, and thereby tackle the water scarcity crisis.
Image: Shawn Day / Unsplash
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