Leading UK water conservation through innovative technology and behaviour change
Start date
September 2024End date
September 2025Overview
The UK is facing an unprecedented water crisis, with a staggering deficit of 5 billion litres per day (England) predicted by 2050. As domestic supply cuts and soaring prices become a reality, the University of Surrey is stepping up to confront this existential threat head-on with a new ESRC IAA funded project aimed at revolutionising how we manage water consumption in our homes.
The project builds on previous successful research led by Dr Pablo Pereira-Doel, which focused on understanding and mitigating water consumption through in-shower technology. This work showed that demand-side water use can be reduced, without impacting consumer experience, through technology-assisted behaviour change.
Building on existing collaborative networks, the team will undertake three interlinked work packages that expand Surrey's test-bed activities beyond showering (e.g., toilets, kitchens) to cover 'whole-home' water usage, and engage with water stakeholders to understand industry/consumer needs and collectively develop national solutions.
Team
Principal Investigator
Dr Benjamin Gardner
Reader in Psychology; MSc Behaviour Change Programme Lead
Biography
Dr Benjamin Gardner is recognised internationally as an expert researcher, lecturer and public speaker in the psychology of habitual behaviour. He joined Surrey in April 2022. Over 15+ years of behavioural science research, he has published over 180 research papers and book chapters, mostly exploring how the concept of 'habit' can be drawn on to understand and change everyday human behaviours, with especial focus on health behaviours. He has given talks and hosted seminars and workshops with academic, practitioner, commercial and public audiences across the UK and Europe, and in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and USA. As of December 2024, his work has been cited over 16,000 times, including in more than 200 policy documents.
Dr Gardner is founder and co-Director of the Habit Application and Theory group, and co-Lead of the Sustainability through Behaviour Change research programme at the University of Surrey Institute for Sustainability. He is co-Lead of the European Health Psychology Society Habit Special Interest Group. He holds editorial board positions at Health Psychology Review and Social Science & Medicine, and is a Consultant at British Journal of Health Psychology.
Dr Gardner's research relates to psychological processes that affect all behaviours. Nonetheless, the main behaviours that he has focused on to date have been health (e.g., sedentary behaviour and sitting, physical activity, dietary consumption) and environmentally relevant actions (e.g., travel mode choice). He has led funded research projects to develop novel habit-based interventions to reduce sedentary behaviour in office workers and older adults, and contributed habit and behaviour change expertise to funded work (e.g. MRC, NIHR) supporting health promotion among older adults, office workers, parents and children.
Co-Investigator
Dr Pablo Pereira Doel
Director of Undergraduate Hospitality Programmes; Human Insight Lab co-director; Sustainability fellow and Water programme co-lead at the Institute for Sustainability; Visiting Fellow, Center for Tourism Research at Wakayama University (Japan)
Biography
Dr Pablo Pereira-Doel is the director of the Undergraduate Hospitality Programmes at Surrey Business School, the lead of the Institute for Sustainability's Water literacy and sustainable water behaviour programme, and the co-director of the Human Insight Lab.
After several years in the hospitality/tourism industry in Spain, France, The Gambia, and the UK, he is now an applied social scientist who uses sustainability-oriented innovations, consumer nudging, persuasive communication, design thinking, and experimental research methods to create pro-environmental behaviour change. His consumer and industry testing research contributed to developing a smart water-saving technology to nudge users to take shorter showers.
Pablo's problem-solving transdisciplinary research has involved partnerships with several companies in the hospitality industry (e.g. Scandic, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, TUI, Hostelling International, and others) and beyond (e.g. Aguardio ApS, Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, L'Oréal, and the UN Environment Program).
His research has been funded through internal scholarships, an ESRC SeNSS Industry Engagement Fund, three ESRC Impact Acceleration Funds, a UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Pablo is the first researcher in the UK to be awarded an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in hospitality/tourism.
Planned Impact
The project has three main objectives:
- To enhance the University's Living Lab infrastructure, creating an agile testbed for innovative water conservation technologies develop to tackle these and future, emergent priorities.
- To engage stakeholders in co-producing a bid for the multimillion-pound OFWAT 2025 Water Efficiency Fund, to implement a new, nationwide technology-assisted behaviour change programme to save water, protecting UK domestic supply.
- To collaboratively develop a White Paper outlining a national strategy for reducing domestic water consumption and co-create a domestic water impact agenda document, to drive collaborative activities in this area.
The urgency of this initiative cannot be overstated. With the threat of water shortages looming, the University of Surrey is committed to leading the charge in finding sustainable solutions.
A high profile stakeholder workshop in October 2024 has kick started this initiative.
"With ESRC IAA funding, we will expand our infrastructure and impact activities to apply our behaviour led approach more comprehensively, and so lead the whole-home water conservation field. We will engage with industry stakeholders to create pathways to impact by understanding needs and promoting easy, unobtrusive behaviour changes to save UK consumers money and protect the water supply."
Dr Benjamin Gardner