Per capita water consumption for benchmarked South African service levels derived by means of explicit reasoning

A few other local studies included the independent variables of property value and household income (Husselman and Van Zyl, 2005), rainfall, temperature, evaporation and service levels (Griffioen and Van Zyl, 2014) and also water pressure (Meyer et al., 2018). The tool presented in this paper could be used for estimating per capita water consumption in the absence of recorded water use, for example, when planning water infrastructure of new housing developments in urban settings, or for setting realistic consumption targets in water demand management plans. The objectives were to: (i) conduct a knowledge review focusing on South Africa, (ii) collect relevant per capita consumption data from local studies, (iii) develop a structured approach to describe per capita water use in relation to a set of specific indicators, (iv) develop an estimation tool in MS Excel format, and (v) illustrate the typical ranges of per capita consumption experienced locally as a function of the selected input variables. The Covid-19 pandemic was also found to impact urban water use (Kalbusch et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021), due to spread-prevention measures and changed habits (e.g., increased hand washing).