Abstract
This study investigates the water – electricity nexus in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the water and electricity consumption across six socioeconomic sectors. Due to inadequate research on spatial modelling of water – electricity nexus in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study investigated geographical zonal-level variation in water and electricity consumption in Doha city of Qatar. Statistical and spatial analyses were performed to investigate the spatial differences in each sector. Five geospatial techniques in a Geographical Information System (GIS) context were used in the study. Moran’s I, Anselin Local Moran's I, and Getis-Ord G_i^* statistics tools were used to identify the hot spots and cold spots of water and electricity consumption in each sector. Furthermore, Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models were employed to investigate the spatial relationship between water and electricity consumption during the pandemic year. The results show some relationship between water and electricity consumption in some zones of each sector. In addition, the results reveal the GWR model is a useful method for examining spatially varying relationship between water and electricity consumption as it outperformed and proved superior to the OLS regression model in terms of goodness-of-fit. Mapping the hot spot zones and the zones with high relationship between water and electricity consumption could provide useful insight to decision-makers for targeted interventions.
