Drivers of urban water consumption in Brazil: a countrywide, cross-sectional study

Urban water consumption can be influenced by several factors and may have different patterns due to regional and local specificities. This research aims to determine the influence of climatic, geographic, demographic, economic, social and water-supply-service-related factors on the per capita water consumption in Brazil using a dataset with 1746 municipalities. For this purpose, a multiple linear regression model using log-transformed data was fitted. The results show that household income, water tariff, number of residents per household, temperature, percentage of households with washing machine, city population, gender, percentage of households with piped water and the municipality's GDP significantly influence urban water consumption.