Science for Environmental policy.Combining behavioural change and game-like incentive models encourages consumers to save water

The EU has several ongoing research projects that aim to instigate water-saving behaviour using ICT smart metering, which help customers to visualise their water use. The Smart H2O project1, provides household users with daily feedback and has a gamified incentive model that usesvisualisation, saving tips, and personal, social, virtual, and physical rewards. Similar EU FP7 research projects using ICT are the WATERNOMICS project, which provides personal feedback using dashboards to aid decision-making, and the WISDOM project, which provides real-time consumption feedback on a display with a digital game. These last two projects have published promising results on their impact on water consumption. Shower systems with alarms and visualisation displays showed consumption reductions of 27% and 22% respectively over a short trial period. This is promising —but so far, smart-meter feedback alone has not provided long-lasting behaviour change. This study examines ICT systems through the lens of changing habits in the long term, by providing motivators to encourage people to make the leap across the intention–behaviour gap. Full article here.