We need to rethink our attitude to one of life’s essential resources, says Howard Sharman

Water is such an important component of life, and can be so easily a carrier of death. It is also an area where that the world’s corporations can really make a difference. And so, in late August, World Water Week took place in Stockholm and generated a torrent of statistics. Let’s take just a few:

• More than one in six people worldwide, that’s 894 million, don’t have access to improved water sources.

• Global water demand is projected to increase by 55% by 2050, due to growing needs for manufacturing, energy generation and domestic use.

• Almost four billion people will live in water-stressed river basins by 2050 if better policies are not introduced.

• More than a quarter of the water that we use worldwide grows 1bn tonnes of food each year that doesn’t get eaten.

The problems keep coming. The UK Department for International Development’s Rapid Response Network was mobilised for the first time in August to help two million people affected by the cholera outbreak in Sierra Leone – cholera, of course, is a water-borne disease. The World Health Organisation has also recently reported that, worldwide, 1.5 million under-fives are killed annually by diarrhoea – also often caused by dirty water.

For those who have water, though, anything is possible. An exhibition at the Stockholm conference showed that the production of an average hamburger – two slices of bread, beef, tomato, lettuce, onions and cheese – consumed about 2,400 litres of water. An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water while a beef steak, a staple in the world’s industrial countries, consumes about 7,000 litres.

Much of the increase in global water demand, of course, is going to come from the developing world, where people will want to move away from their diets of vegetables and start eating beef steaks, just like the Europeans and North Americans.

In the midst of these stories of doom and gloom, it was refreshing to read that PepsiCo had won the Stockholm Industry Water Award for its efforts on water conservation – efforts that extend not just to its own production plants, but also to its supply chain.

Enlightened self-interest

Speaking about the award, Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, said: “Reducing our water usage drives cost reductions and reduces our overall environmental footprint, and so we’re innovating to make the most of every drop of water used.” So there is some enlightened self-interest here – cost reduction as well as environmental improvements, satisfying the shareholders as well as the activists.

PepsiCo’s citation was based on the steps it had taken to conserve water across its business operations and agricultural supply chain, including improving global water use efficiency by more than 20% per unit of production and conserving nearly 16bn litres of water in 2011, from a 2006 baseline, through the application of water-saving equipment and technologies, creative recycling and re-use, and by deploying a water management system throughout its manufacturing facilities.

PepsiCo has also been working with its suppliers, innovating a variety of agricultural practices and technologies around the world that are designed to reduce water use in farming through new irrigation techniques, and developing tools that help farmers deliver fertiliser and water to their crops at the optimal time.

Finally, the company was praised for providing access to safe water for more than one million people through the PepsiCo Foundation and other partners.

Liese Dallbauman, PepsiCo’s director of water stewardship – not many companies have one of those – talked to Reuter’s AlertNet about the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) award. “There’s an ever increasing recognition that nobody owns the water, that we all influence it, we all benefit from it and that it's much more efficient if we work together to make things better,” said Dallbauman.

This is welcome recognition that water is one of the great Commons that no one owns, everyone needs, and that can so easily be abused.

Over time, the amazing statistics about the amount of water needed to create, say, a hamburger are going to move further into public consciousness. Is it outlandish to think that, in years to come, eating a hamburger – while children die from lack of access to clean drinking water – could be seen as being as anti-social as smoking? If that is the case, then it is certainly enlightened self-interest for major corporate users of water to be taking action today to reduce their water footprint so that, when that day comes, they have not only done right, but can be seen to have done right.

An average meal of rice, beef and vegetables requires about 4,230 litres of water

Howard Sharman is a senior consultant with Advance Aid.