Interpreting householder preferences to evaluate water supply systems: Stage 3

[摘要] Executive Summary:This reports the results of Stage 3 in the development and investigation of an attitudinal model designed to measure perceived acceptability of a given water supply system and to understand the factors that govern the acceptability decision.Concurrent with the growing need for Australian cities to boost their present water reserves, the community has displayed increasing interest in proposed sources of supplementary water supply.Public attitude has ranged from enthusiasm to concern, and in some cases unease has led to the rejection of a potential new water supply.While it is understood that the success of new supply systems is dependent on incorporating householder preferences and improving understanding within our communities, no research to date has attempted to examine acceptance of a new water supply system in a truly holistic manner.This research program aimed to develop a model of community acceptance that is robust and consistent over different scales, source-points, end-uses and users of water supply systems.Further, for the model to be a valuable tool for decision-makers, a worthwhile amount of the variance in users' acceptability ratings would have to be accounted for by a relatively small number of factors.In this report, a pre-refined model of community acceptance, incorporating a range of psycho-sociological variables, is tested using scenarios outlining three different potential water supply systems for the future at different scales.Three sample populations, taken from the metropolitan populations of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne respectively, were each administered a scenario, chosen on the basis of probably future water augmentation options for that city.The scenario tested on the Sydney sample population concerned a 10-storey residential building with an onsite wastewater treatment plant.this system, under the general management of the body corporate, piped treated wastewater back to building residents for use on domestic garden areas and for toilet flushing.The scenario system tested on the Brisbane sample population captured stormwater from roofs i na 200-home neighbrouhood, treated it and returned it to the regular water supply system.In this case the system was managed by Brisbane Water.The scenario system tested on the Melbourne sample population took wastewater from sewerage pipes and treated it at neighbourhood-level, privately run treatment plants.Treated water was pumped back in a separate pipe for use in domestic garden areas, for toilet flushing, and for local irrigation and industrial use.The results of the study confirmed the model developed through previous stages of testing, with the predictor variables of risk, fairness, subjective assessment of the supply system, and perceived outcomes of the supply system all having strong relationships with acceptance of the supply system.Trust was also an important component through its relationship with risk.The model outputs for the three scenarios were extremely strong in their predictive power, predicting 63% of the variance in acceptability in the Sydney scenario, 78% in Brisbane and 68% in Melbourne.Sydney respondents rated the acceptability of their scenario significantly higher than did Brisbane and Melbourne respondents.Sydney and Melbourne tended to rate cognitive outcomes such as responsibility and longevity more highly than Brisbane, while Brisbane rated emotive outcomes like the pleasantness and the cleanliness of the system more highly.Public versus private arrangements had significant effects on acceptability ratings, suggesting that the role of public agencies in the management of supply systems is critical.The stability of the model in this phase of the research program supports the notion that a holistic measurement of people's acceptance can be used to assess alternative water supply systems at a variety of scales, and has the capacity to inform how best to tailor community acceptance strategies to a specific water supply system under proposal.

[发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)