The Responsiveness of Urban Water Demand to Working from Home Intensity

Abstract

Working from home (WFH) is now widespread around the world. Sustainability benefits can arise from WFH, but there remains limited evidence on resource use and its full sustainability implications. To provide some answers on this issue, we analyse water use data from Sydney, Australia, mapped against mobility changes during the natural experiment that COVID-19-related lockdowns represented. We use an auto-regressive distributed lag model to evaluate how variations in WFH influence the demand for water, after accounting for factors like temperature, rainfall, water restrictions, and so on. We find that in response to a 10% increase in WFH, single residential demand does not significantly change, whilst multi-dwelling demand increases 1%, industrial demand decreases 2%, commercial demand increases 3%, and miscellaneous demand increases 3%. Overall, sectoral changes balance each other out, leaving no significant change in aggregate demand. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we operationalise WFH by looking at the intensity of workplace mobility during the pandemic. Second, we establish disaggregated sectoral water consumption elasticities to WFH and show that aggregate water consumption patterns disguise sectoral changes that relate to where and when water is consumed. These results need to inform infrastructure and water supply–demand planning.