What could possibly be new about water, the number one natural capital resource in the world?
Plenty.
“Water in the global business culture is pretty new,” says Elizabeth Hendriks, vice-president of freshwater at WWF-Canada. “Five years ago it was a non-issue, how water interacted with companies or corporations’ businesses. For corporations, especially those with large supply chains, it’s increasingly becoming a risk and a business issue.”
Over the past five years, water has risen on the ladder of business risk concerns. In the World Economic Forum’s 2015 rankings of the top 10 global risks, water was eighth in likelihood of being a global risk, but the impact of a water crisis to a business was “the biggest risk you can have.”
The report also estimates that global water requirements are expected to be pushed beyond sustainable water supplies by 40 per cent by 2030, in addition to predicting that “decision-makers will be forced to make tough choices about allocations of water that will impact users
across the economy.”
As a result, companies are finding that the argument for decreasing water use has grown more powerful.
“The good companies are working on water sustainability, because it’s a major risk to their bottom line – especially in places like California, says Hendriks. “Anyone who’s aware of climate change or needing to adapt to climate change are beginning to insert it into their core business practices.”
Is water actually at risk?
There are three factors that put the world’s water supply at risk, says Tim Nixon, director of sustainability at Thomson Reuters and managing editor of its Sustainability publication.
One factor is population growth. He notes that the world will soon have nine billion people, and “all of those folks need clean drinking water and something to eat.”
Another problem is our “constant drum beat for economic development and economic growth,” with populations increasingly looking beyond food staples like rice. “It’s becoming more and more about hamburgers and bacon,” he says.
Most pressing of all, however, is climate change.
According to the World Economic Forum report, drought will increase in frequency and severity due to changing weather, leading to overall drier conditions in some parts of the world and heightening the risk of geopolitical destabilization and armed conflict. “Countries that share rivers have a statistically higher likelihood of armed conflict, and dry countries experience more conflict,” the report says.
Nixon also points to climate change’s effect on oceans, with rising acidification and sea-level rise likely to raise havoc among food ecosystem services.” In particular, sea levels are expected to be the most significant issue over the mid-to-longer term, he says.
Who's making moves?
Forward-thinking industries are taking steps to minimize water use before it becomes an insurmountable problem.
Beverage companies, for example, have much to gain from a more sustainable use of water, and when they are “pointed to by certain aspects of the environmental community as being unsustainable … they will sometimes take pains to voluntarily minimize that,” says Neil Fromer, executive director of the Resnick Institute at the California Institute of Technology.
Coca-Cola, who has bottling plants around the world, has adopted a strategy of replenishing the water they use back into the ecosystem. For example, if a bottling plant is located in a watershed, the company also looks to do a restoration project in the same watershed to “replenish” the water used. Coca-Cola has said that it aims to be water neutral by 2020.
Another global company, Unilever, has a plan to double the size of its business while reducing its environmental footprint, reduce water used in manufacturing, and develop products that require less water to be used effectively.
According to the company, its cleaning products are used for 90 per cent of the water used in homes, so water scarcity in developing countries limits the growth of their products if consumers must make difficult choices about how to ration water.
“I think a lot of large water-user companies have an incentive to find places where they can cut back on their water use in their process,” says Fromer.
Is regulation necessary?
“There are increasingly regulations around the world that are tightening, ensuring it costs money to clean up the water you use, and in terms of maintaining your bottom line you want to be discharging clean water,” says Hendriks of WWF.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the forestry industry had to make changes to the way it operated, and “think about the chemicals they were discharging into the environment, and that impacted the amount of water they used, and the cost of moving water,” she said. “They didn’t want to have to transport more water or clean more water, because it costs more. So when they were looking into how to ensure they were discharging better quality water, it really did become about being much more efficient.”
In another example, Nixon explains that in Minnesota, the state now requires buffer strips along the edges of fields to filter water before it drains.
These strips, an estimated 110,000 acres of land along drainage areas, can prevent phosphorous fertilizer and herbicides used to grow corn and other crops from entering rivers including the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
“If you’ve got a 50-foot strip of land that’s in grass along the edges of drainage areas across all of the upper midwest, that’s a lot of arable land,” says Nixon. “So there’s a real valid discussion there, between the public interest and private interest.”
Where is this headed?
Imagine having no access to a toilet that works – for 4.5 billion people in the world, a lack of adequate sanitation facilities can have financial, environmental and even deadly consequences.
That’s just one of the world’s water-related problems that teams at Caltech have been trying to solve using solar technology. Harnessing the power of solar panels, the teams have been looking at ways to create cheaper electricity that can in turn be used to pump, desalinate, and even clean water.
Caltech’s solar powered toilet won the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvented Toilet Challenge in 2012, and uses solar power to clean water up so it can be reused for toilet flushing.
The system is designed for places that don’t have waste water treatment in a centralized fashion, says Neil Fromer. The goal is to have a sustainable sanitation system that can be maintained and fixed by the local community. The first pilots started a year or two ago in China and India, with more pilots in more cities in those countries this summer.