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The British weather may be an international joke, but did you know that London is actually drier than Istanbul? Or that the South East of England has less water available per person than the Sudan and Syria?
These are the kind of facts experts hope will motivate businesses and consumers to look again at the amount of water they use. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) UK, in a joint announcement with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), have encouraged UK companies to measure and ration water in the same way they increasingly do with carbon. Water footprinting, they suggest, could become as common a concept as carbon footprinting.
Each person in the UK currently uses about 150 litres of water every day. This has been rising by 1 percent a year since 1930 and is not sustainable in the long-term. Large-scale drought is already occurring in the UK, with the lowest rainfall, groundwater and reservoir levels for decades.
About 65 percent of the water we use is in our food, with a tomato having about 13 litres of water ‘embedded’ in it, and a burger around 2,400 litres. It takes about 136 drops of water to produce one drop of tea, and about 1,100 drops of water to produce one drop of coffee.
The ACCA and WWF UK have warned that UK businesses should be much more aware of the importance of managing water resources in their operational activities. Climate change and carbon footprinting are major concerns, but water issues need to be given equal attention, the ACCA claims in its discussion paper ‘Water: the next carbon?’, which was presented at a recent ACCA event on water footprinting.
Dr Dave Tickner, head of freshwater programmes at WWF UK and one of the speakers at the event, said: “Ensuring water security is one of the greatest challenges facing the world in the 21st century. The sustainable supply of water to all users, including businesses, underpins economic growth, poverty reduction, food and energy security and adaptation to the effects of climate change.
“Wise management of this critical natural resource is therefore in all of our interests. WWF believes that companies, as major users of water, could play a key role in promoting better water management.”
Discussion and outcomes points highlighted at the event by Dr Tickner and Andy Wales, Head of Sustainability at SAB Miller, included: water as a key business risk; water footprinting methodologies; public-private partnerships; corporate water management and how it can be achieved, and mainstream investor interest in water.
So, what can organisations do? The report recommends that one action is the determination and calculation of the water footprint, to ascertain where material water impacts originate (both in terms of the region affected and the impacts themselves) and how they can be managed.
Calculation of this footprint then leads on to comprehensive disclosure on the issue within annual and sustainability reports.
An organisation’s water footprint can be thought of as its ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ or ‘virtual’ water impacts. Direct water is ‘internal’ water that is used directly from the tap and taken directly from a company’s own country’s water resources. Virtual water is that which is used throughout the entire ‘cradle to grave’ process to produce a product or service (for example, water used to grow crops, feed animals and use products at the consumer end of the supply chain). Virtual water is obviously much more complex to measure than direct water.
The ACCA and WWF UK have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding to work together on ACCA’s UK Awards for Sustainability Reporting 2009 research, which will assess the standard of UK disclosures on water use and management.
The ACCA has long championed CSR and environmental reporting for businesses, and believes UK businesses should be applying the same approach to water resources and management.
Vicky McAllister, Sustainability Advisor at ACCA, says: “We are very pleased to be working with WWF UK on this issue. UK businesses should be addressing and reporting on the importance of water resources and management in their operations as well as upstream and downstream activities, one element of which is calculating the water footprint. WWF UK is considered an expert in this field and the research should yield some interesting results for UK organisations to take on board.”