Media attention to drought produced water savings

With a new web-scraping and search algorithm and real water utility data, Stanford researchers have shown a relationship between media coverage of the recent historic California drought and household water savings. With increased drought coverage from newspapers, water conservation increased in the San Francisco Bay Area during the drought that ended in 2016. That's according to a new study from Stanford researchers that links real water consumption data with the public attention garnered by California's recent droughts. Stanford researchers found that heightened news coverage of the most recent drought was related to greater water conservation by Californians. (Image credit: nevarpp / Getty Images) "A number of water utilities that we work with observed unprecedented and unexpected water conservation levels during the recent drought in California compared to previous ones," said hydrologist Newsha Ajami , who directs Urban Water Policy and Innovation research for Stanford's Water in the West program. "We were curious to see what was prompting this level of public response, especially before the 2015 conservation mandate went into effect." Ajami wondered if the heightened news coverage of the most recent drought might explain some of this behavior. In an attempt to answer those questions, graduate student Kim Quesnel worked with Ajami to develop models examining conservation in different water districts throughout the Bay Area.