Water Footprints and Watershed Restoration

The concept of a carbon footprint has gained legitimacy within many realms of the governmental and business worlds. A new footprint, however, is gaining popularity: the water footprint. As highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, water footprinting is primarily used by businesses, with the addition of information on water-scarce areas around the world, in order to understand areas where future water problems may harm business interests:

SABMiller's [a multi-billion dollar international brewer] executives started to worry about the company's water footprint in August 2007. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development had just released its online "global water tool," which allows companies to enter the GPS coordinates of their factory sites in order to identify hot spots where water scarcity overlaps with factory operations or agricultural supply chains. The results were alarming: About 30 of the company's sites, including factories in South Africa, India and Peru, were shown to be vulnerable to future water shortages, says Andy Wales, SABMiller's director of sustainable development.

The story outlined the importance of fresh water, and its growing scarcity throughout the entire world, especially in light of global warming:

A large water footprint isn't necessarily bad if the product is made in an area where water is plentiful and well managed. ... But it is temporarily unavailable for other uses, and may not be restored to the same aquifer, lake or river if it comes back as rainfall in another region. That poses problems for water-scarce areas.

However, missing from the story is a clear delineation between water quality and quantity. Many areas that currently face problems of declining water quantity also are beset by problems of water quality. If the water quality were to increase, so too would the quantity of usable water. That is where watershed restoration comes in. These businesses, and the governments and communities that they support, should proactively undertake targetted watershed restoration projects to increase water quality to a level that is usable in their industrial processes. In many cases, this could actually be cheaper than often-complicated means of increasing water quantity, and would yield countless positive side effects for ecosystem. We at Wildlands CPR will be monitoring the situation closely, and hope to report back in the future that positive gains are being made.