Raising global awareness using water footprints
Water Footprint
PRES: The city of Stockholm, often called beauty on water, hosted the annual World Water Week that ended last Friday. The conference brought together global leaders and thinkers to discuss water-related issues. The United Nations predicts that almost half of the world’s population will face shortages by 2030. Jocelyne Sambira reports on the concept of water footprints, the notion of measuring how much water we use. INTRO: We consume water for most of our daily activities like drinking, eating showering. We also consume water in the products that we buy. Because of the rise in the global population, the human consumption of water has tripled and it is putting a strain on our freshwater supplies. As a result, water footprint is emerging as a new concept. Hannah Studdard of the Global Public Policy Network on Water Management breaks it down for us.
STUDDARD: In simple terms, a water footprint is a measure of the total water used to produce goods and services that a particular individual, group or nation uses. We now know for example, that a cup of coffee requires 140 liters of water and that per capita Americans consume around 6,800 liters of virtual water everyday over a triple that of a Chinese person.
NARR: Dan Bena of PepsiCo believes this concept of water footprint has been powerful and useful in a sense.
BENA: On of the biggest value that is emerging from the use of foot print is really awareness building. And it is awareness building for corporate, it is awareness building for governments and for academia. So, really multi-stakeholder groups have really caught on to the concept the water footprint. I would consider the concept still rather nascent, there is still a lot of work to be done, although a lot of work has been done.
NARR: Water footprint being a new concept, the definition itself is still not clear. Chris Williams of the World Wide Life Fund USA says.
WILLIAMS: Right now water footprint is applied to individuals, to companies, to nations, and all those are in different contexts and so you need to think about water footprints in different ways. For example, there are benefits to companies of knowing their water footprint in that they can potentially reduce the water that they put in their products. Water footprint at the end of the day is a measurement, and you can use the measurement in all sorts of ways to come to all sorts of conclusions.
NARR: Guy Howard of the UK Department for International Development, DFID, is more worried about how this measurement will be used. HOWARD: You have to be careful that something like a water footprint does not become a measure that fundamentally works against the interest of poor people in developing countries. We have to have a sensible nuanced approach to these measurements where we don’t run into a situation where poor farmers in Africa are made poorer because everybody says we don’t want to buy their products because there is too much embedded water in them. NARR: National water footprints are showing just how much water industrialized countries use indirectly when they import products like coffee and cacao from developing nations. With the threat of climate change, these water supplies will gradually dry up, so the wealthy and poor nations both have an interest to work together to better protect and manage these resources. The UN Watercourses Convention gives them this platform.