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Since 1997, the Regional Municipality of Durham (Toronto's eastern neighbor) has been using Community-Based Social Marketing (C.B.S.M.) to reduce the overwatering of lawns. CBSM promotes issues of societal benefit by working at the neighborhood level using face-to-face contact. Durham employs college-aged summer students to talk directly with area residents. These students provide lawn and gardening information to residents that challenges their current habits and misconceptions. Careful preparation and thorough training are both necessary because the program attempts to erode habits that may have been developed and ingrained over years of repetition and peer pressure. A key to the program's success was to avoid coercing residents into changing their habits. Other studies have shown that coerced change does not result in sustainable change. True to CBSM methods, the students' technique was to initially give the residents something, and then to request a small change in habit in return. This way, major behavioral change is broken down into smaller, manageable requests which residents can become comfortable with over a period of time. CBSM methods are designed to give residents the chance to understand and embrace the need for change. Getting the written commitment (a public contract) to water a maximum of 1" per week (including rainfall) was the chief goal of the program. Close to 90% of the program participants pledged to follow their 1"/week commitment. Targets for the summer of 2000 program were to double the number of households contacted (to 1,500), half it's cost (from $88 to $44/household) and to quantify the changes in water use. The results were that 1,400 households participated at a cost of $45/household and an average irrigation reduction of 32%. This meant that for every dollar spent on the program, two infrastructure expansion dollars were saved. Plans for the summer of 2001 call for further evolutions in program methods that include testing several methods of social diffusion to carry water reductions to 3,000 households while striving to maintain water reductions in the 30% range. Social diffusion relies on the same basis of CBSM, but not exclusively on the face-to-face contact of the students. The students will work with a network of groups and leaders within the community to spread the benefits of reduced lawn watering. As with the work in 2000, the summer of 2001 study will use data loggers and a control area to quantify any changes in outdoor water use. Includes figures.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 01/01/2002 Number of Pages: 7File Size: 1 file , 160 KB