Understanding culture to conserve water
A group of UNSW water researchers: Juan Carlos Castilla-Rho, Martin Andersen (both from the Faculty of Engineering) and Cameron Holley (from the Faculty of Law), have collaborated with Rodrigo Rojas (CSIRO) and Gregoire Mariethoz (University of Lausanne) to publish a Nature Human Behaviour research paper on the way cultural differences impact peoples’ responses to water conservation methods.
In the face of climate change, groundwater is critical for maintaining global food security and sustaining millions of rural livelihoods. However, the over-exploitation of this resource for agriculture has become a serious concern globally, and little is known about what would encourage groundwater users to comply with conservation laws and policies.
The modelling platform that Juan Carlos developed provides a really powerful way of combining socio-economic modelling with the physical modelling of groundwater flow
Dr Martin Andersen, UNSW Faculty of Engineering
Associate Professor Cameron Holley said compliance with rules is a challenge in many aspects of life, but it is particularly so in the case of groundwater:
“Because the resource is underground, illegal extraction is often difficult to identify. Juan Carlos was the innovator here; he combined his modelling skills with our work on issues like compliance, groundwater science and engineering to enhance our knowledge of why people do—or do not—follow groundwater conservation rules."
The researchers modelled farmers’ use of groundwater for crop irrigation in three regions where extraction control is needed: the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia, the Central Valley in California, United States and the Punjab on the India/Pakistan border.
They incorporated data on social attitudes to cooperation and rule conformity in the different regions, and found that strong punitive measures are effective in cooperative cultures (like the Punjab), but much less so in more individualistic cultures (such as the USA and Australia).
“The modelling platform that Juan Carlos developed provides a really powerful way of combining socio-economic modelling with the physical modelling of groundwater flow, which allows us, for the first time, to explore the human-resource interactions in a dynamic modelling framework,” said Dr Martin Andersen
The research suggests that this knowledge could be utilised to identify more effective interventions for specific national cultures.
Where monitoring and enforcing groundwater conservation is time-consuming, costly and politically difficult, the key to planning cost-effective governance and management could well be found in understanding cultural sensitivities.
The research found that the most effective intervention for influencing groundwater conservation is increasing the number of role-model rule-followers in a population—although the number of rule-followers required to tip the scale of social acceptability varied strongly between regions.
The authors suggested that the same model could also be applied to other shared natural resources which are also under threat, such as fisheries and forests.