Sustainable Water Practices: Understanding Water Consumption Behaviors Across Age Groups. Insights into Effective Strategies for Promoting Sustainable Water Use

Today, humanity finds itself having to jointly manage multiple crisis situations linked to political and social factors, as well as to the climate and the environment. Within the latter, there are pressing issues involving air, land, and water. Water plays a key role in the survival of man and the Earth and is a necessary requirement for the social and economic development of societies. In this work, the issues relating to this last resource were analyzed, investigating how much individual citizens know about the resource and its conditions and whether they implement behaviors that aim to prevent water waste. The survey was carried out by administering a questionnaire on the main social media as well as through channels such as e-mail, Teams and WhatsApp. Data collection took place in May and June 2023. A sample of 263 respondents have participated to the survey. The results show that, despite a low frequency in the introduction of water rationing measures or suspension of supply in the places where one lives, the knowledge of the problem of scarcity, as well as the experimentation of extreme climatic phenomena appear to be medium-high and, many of them believe it is appropriate to increase the dissemination of information about the problem. Furthermore, it was possible to observe that there is a poor attitude among individuals to change their eating habits in exchange for greater water sustainability, while the results linked to behaviors regarding personal hygiene are positive. Regarding the cleaning of the environments, however, it was observed that there is no real tendency towards virtuous or harmful behavior on the part of the subjects, but the degree of implementation proved to be high depending on the activity mentioned.