Global water resources are under severe stress, with new innovative footprinting and management solutions required
There is a water crisis. But it is solvable. It will not be easy, and we risk losing the battle – but it can be done. This was the general conclusion at the 21st Stockholm Water Week conference, held in August.
Put simply, the world’s underground aquifers and freshwater surface bodies – rivers, lakes and wetlands – are being sucked dry. Some estimates suggest that, by 2020, humanity’s demand for water will outstrip supply by 40%. In 20 years’ time, the United Nations forecasts that almost half the world’s population will live in areas facing water stress or water scarcity.
Compounding this ominous future is climate change, which is affecting water availability through droughts and flooding in regions including the Mediterranean basin and southern Europe, South and Central America, western Asia, and the subtropical regions of Africa and Australia.
Like atmospheric carbon dioxide, water scarcity is a global issue. In its broadest sense it is a far more intractable – and far more localised – problem, given water’s role in underpinning everything from food and energy security, to economic growth, climate change adaptation and biodiversity loss and conflict.
Try solving the water crisis and you run into the intricacies of complex social, economic and environmental systems. In practice, water scarcity is more often caused by the nature of demand and the inappropriate allocation of water, rather than by simple lack of the natural resource. In other words, the challenge may not be so much true scarcity as mismanagement.
With this awesome challenge in mind, the experts assembled in Stockholm committed to pursuing the tremendous opportunities presented – for smarter solutions do exist, according to conference host Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm Water Institute.
“All is not bad news,” he says, citing increasing urbanisation as a dangerously fraught development threatening new heights of unchecked consumerism that nevertheless offers a setting in which to collaborate and discover effective means of allocating water.
“Cities provide great economies of scale and offer excellent opportunities for effective infrastructure development, for increased reuse of water and waste, and for more efficient use of water and energy,” Berntell says.
By focusing on “urbanisation” as the conference theme, organisers were acceding to experts in the water community who had openly appealed for increased focus on water issues in city planning.
But what are the practical steps? If, indeed, a different path in terms of water and sanitation can begin to be realised, how might experts and practitioners work with the private sector in complementing government and municipal authorities to deliver the solutions?
Social enterprise
Among the management solutions presented in Stockholm, “simple” instruments for demand reduction, such as pricing, and techniques including rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling are part of the much discussed multi-sectoral approach to water and wastewater management.
In India, for example, rainwater harvesting is happening on a large scale in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi. It is included in the state policy and in the building code for new buildings. Reports from international organisations indicate that 11 recent projects across Delhi resulted in groundwater level increases by between five and 10 metres in just two years.
Treatment and reuse of water from storm water drainage, sewage and other effluents is another route to greatly supplementing water supplies. Globally, 70% of wastewater goes untreated – presenting a tremendous health risk but also an opportunity.
“The agriculture revolution will be in water management and how we treat soil,” says Arno Rosmarien, a senior research fellow with EcoSanRes, a research group that aims to replace pit latrines with soil-based green toilets, turning excreta into high-nutrient compost for agricultural use.
But if there’s a wealth of new knowledge and information, water professionals say they face tremendous difficulties turning expertise into mainstream practices.
“Everybody recognises the challenges are huge, and people at the [Stockholm] conference were trying to be creative but they’re doing so from existing silos,” says David Wilcox, founder of ReachScale, a consultancy aimed at bridging the gap between corporate and social enterprise.
“People need to innovate on-the-ground the products or, in the case of Water.org, identify the areas and the products for the areas,” said Wilcox. Water.org is, to date, the most successful social enterprise in the water sector.
Water as product
Through its WaterCredit microfinance tool, Water.org is on track to raise $10m in 2011, up from $4m in 2010. The concept is to treat water as a product line against which loans can be made without other collateral – given that improved access to water reduces health costs, for example, freeing up time for increased economic activity.
One of Water.org’s most important partners has been PepsiCo, which made a $4.1m grant in 2008, helping to expand and develop the WaterCredit programme early in the development stage.
Procter & Gamble is another company that has scaled up social enterprise investment in the water sector, partnering with Healthpoint Services to deliver telemedicine and clean water to the rural poor in India.
“If you go to any organisation – be it government or a corporate donor – and you ask them what the status is over the last 20 years, they can’t tell you,” says John Sauer of Water for People. This is the NGO group behind Flow, a recently launched smartphone app that enables people in the developing world to report, using photographs, broken water pumps. According to Sauer, 40% of the pumps installed by development agencies fail within a decade.
“How do you get that rate to drop?” he asks. “We have to get the sector to think differently.”
Watershed management
As different approaches to managing water emerge, a WWF report has called for an expanded conception of a city’s “water footprint” visualising water consumption as extending out to rural ecosystems – in other words, including the water use that contributes to products and services used in the city.
The largest portion of a city’s water footprint is actually located outside of city boundaries, say the report’s authors. Indirect impacts in agricultural products account for a mind-boggling 92% of the global consumer’s average water footprint – leading to the realisation that watershed conservation is an essential part of any water management plan.
The water footprint of one cup of coffee, for example, is 140 litres; one cotton T-shirt is 2,700 litres; and one apple is 70 litres, according to data supplied by the Water Footprinting Network.
This kind of supply chain risk accounting is widely known in the private sector, and the report acknowledges no new scientific findings. But the authors say that, as an awareness-raising tool, there is value in offering this conceptual framework for fostering multi-dimensional and properly focused partnerships.
“Government still doesn’t quite understand why business cares or believes that business has a role beyond being efficient and paying their taxes,” says Stuart Orr, manager of the global freshwater programme at WWF International.
And as far as business is concerned, it has taken a seat at the table but thus far has relegated itself largely to discussions of risk allocation.
“The NGOs are working with large corporations, trying to get them focused on what really matters,” says Brian Richter, director of Global Fresh Water at The Nature Conservancy.
Water footprinting and risk assessment tools – characterising, quantifying and locating risk – are all important as a means by which to determine local watershed conditions, but only if they are used ultimately to shape responses.
“It’s about taking care of the watersheds in which you are operating,” Richter says, “either for your own facilities or the next step out in the supply chains.”
Liese Dallbauman is director of water stewardship for PepsiCo, and has worked on a report with The Nature Conservancy examining five pilot watershed studies. Speaking in Stockholm, Dallbauman highlights the challenge of going from understanding the water balance to taking conservation action within local watersheds.
“You need to identify your water source, understand the impacts, the restoration activities and cost-benefits,” Dallbauman says.
Identifying a company’s water source – both the extraction point and where the wastewater is returned into the basin – sets up all later analysis, Richter says. Often issues such as interbasin transfer and lack of transparent data inhibit these investigations.
There isn’t yet a normative framework for acting within watersheds, says Jason Morrison, technical director of the CEO Water Mandate. Morrison is also a participant in the Alliance for Water Stewardship, a multistakeholder effort aimed at developing a coherent set of assessment and response guidelines.
“There are a lot of tools out there that are analytical in nature … but few that really try to lay out a way to address and respond to that risk,” he says.
At present, NGOs have pioneered a number of bilateral partnerships with companies, an ad hoc arrangement that has established best practices in everything from multistakeholder models and footprinting to sustainable livelihoods generation, reforestation efforts and public education. Developing a metric to codify and measure the cost-benefit impact of these actions is something the Alliance for Water Stewardship is aiming to co-ordinate among various efforts now being developed by the CEO Mandate, Water Footprinting Network and The Nature Conservancy.
“We need a basis to judge whether performance outcomes are being achieved,” Morrison says. “That’s where the synergy is between these efforts.”
Clear blue water
No single roadmap yet exists, but many Stockholm conference participants agree that the Global Blue Water Scarcity dataset put out by the Water Footprinting Network is a potential game-changer. It is, to date, the best dataset indicating the availability of water in a given location.
Formed in 2009 in order to standardise definitions and calculation methods for measuring water usage, the WFN is a multistakeholder coalition of scientists, leading companies and NGO groups led by Prof Arjen Hoekstra, a scientist at Twente University in the Netherlands and the originator of the footprint concept.
WFN published its first water footprinting model in 2009. This has since been revised and is today widely used by companies and governments as a basis for formulating sustainable water strategies. But however important footprinting is for creating awareness about water usage, it is still only an accounting tool.
The Global Blue Water Scarcity dataset, by contrast, places a company’s water usage within the context of a given environment – thus providing insight into the sustainability of those footprints.
“It has fundamentally redefined what water scarcity is,” says Orr of the new dataset, adding that it moves companies beyond accounting and towards understanding how their operations affect water flow. Moreover, because the dataset covers 146 crops, it takes companies down into the farmland where the greatest water impact has yet to be tackled head-on.
“A lot of people are still sitting on the sidelines of the water discussion and I just don’t think they’re going to be able to do that in the next three to four years,” Orr says. “With Arjen Hoekstra’s [blue water] dataset it wouldn’t take much of a genius to overlay any company’s supply chain and make them publicly available.”
“It’s a huge step forward,” Morrison argues. “There remain parts of the world where the nature of the data available is shockingly poor.”
Water footprinting tools and methodology
A water footprint visualises the entire amount of water embodied in any well-defined water consuming entity – be it a product, a company, a nation or a city.
For instance, for a piece of beef, the water footprint would entail the water used to grow feed for the cow, the water the cow itself consumed, the water used to clean the cow and the cowshed, and so on.
The water footprint distinguishes between green, blue, and grey water.
Green water refers to rainwater and blue water to water abstracted from surface water. These two present direct water inputs. Grey water accounts for water pollution, and as the water footprint always gives a quantitative figure, it does so by taking the amount of water that would be required to dilute the polluted water down to the legal standards into the total water footprint equation.
Until recently, water scarcity maps relied on water footprinting datasets that didn’t adequately account for reuse and reintroduction of treated water back into the environment. There were conceptual data problems, now accounted for through calculations based on consumption, rather than on net withdrawal.
These refinements have been advanced by Prof Arjen Hoekstra, a scientist at Twente University, the originator of the footprinting concept, working in conjunction with WWF and the Water Footprinting Network (WFN) and developing the Global Blue Water Scarcity dataset.
The water footprinting data compiled by the WFN underpins many of the best watershed risk accounting tools now available through organisations such as WWF, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the Global Environment Management Initiative (GEMI) and the World Resources Institute (WRI).
The WBCSD Global Water Tool allows for geographical hotspotting based on crude indicators of water stress and is purely a risk mapping tool. Combined with the GEMI Local Water Tool (set to launch in spring 2012), it can provide detailed information at the water basin level, though the focus is solely on operations.
WRI’s Aqueduct tool is similar to the DEG-WWF Water Risk Filter (to be released in 2012) in the granularity of detail. Both use a number of indicators grouped into areas of regulatory and reputational risk, among others. But only the WWF tool incorporates the latest data from the WFN, thus providing a more accurate picture for companies concerned with net water withdrawal.