Examining Impacts on Water Demand Resulting from Population and Employment Growth Using a Regional Adjustment Model

This thesis examines the currently available water use data and its limitation for use in scientific research. The first chapter offers a description of the current nationwide water data including descriptions of collection methods and trends found within the data. The varying collection methods used result in inconsistencies within the datasets and between the years. These inconsistencies have resulted in the data being used more as a point of reference than in nationwide empirical analysis of water use. There has been a calling for systematic improvements to the data, which could contribute to greater empirical analysis taking place at the national level. Chapter 2 acts as a caveat to Chapter 3 which employs the nationwide data to examine the impacts of population and employment growth on water demand. The growth dynamic of population and employment has been shown to impact resources utilized by households and firms such as land absorption rates. This thesis applies a regional adjustment model to model the impacts of population and employment growth on water demand. Furthermore, the thesis projects whether water use per person and water use per employee is adjusting towards a future steady state equilibrium. By doing so, this work looks to further the calls for improvements to the Nation’s water use data.

This is to be my (Steven Blake Thomas) final version of the thesis pending all formatting is correct.