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Sustainable Water Management Represents As Big a Risk As Carbon

By Daniel Stouffer

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 08Aug2010 Word count: 586 Viewed: 233 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

It seems that a company's risk management department is busier than ever, as companies worldwide seek to reposition themselves in an increasingly aware environmental atmosphere. Individuals are far more educated about constrained living and expect the companies that they do business with to take a similar approach. It's also difficult to keep up with a raft of new regulations and the potential for increasingly intrusive legislation.

Risk analysts sometimes find it difficult to advise their corporate board rooms about sustainable water management, as it is inherently difficult to understand the depth and breadth of the problem. We use water in the production of almost everything and over the decades we have tended to look at it as a free resource, scarcely valuing real worth.

It seems that a company's risk management department is busier than ever, as companies worldwide seek to reposition themselves in an increasingly aware environmental atmosphere. Individuals are far more educated about constrained living and expect the companies that they do business with to take a similar approach. It's also difficult to keep up with a raft of new regulations and the potential for increasingly intrusive legislation.

We have to take into account two issues associated with sustainable water management. The first is our unsustainable population growth, slated to grow some 9 billion people by the year 2050, a target year that is often used when referring to carbon emission reduction. This places huge demands on finite freshwater availability. Secondly, the effects of global warming caused by our unsustainable living and energy use is in itself causing temperature change and climate alteration, that will also help to decrease the amount of water available for our use.

There are so many factors to bear in mind when creating a sustainable water management plan. Perhaps the most perplexing is the fact that total elimination of water use is often worse than water inefficiency. Sustainable water management likely points to efficiency but not elimination, as often excessive energy use can be associated with total elimination, while this can also lead to solid waste generation and the problems associated there.

Western societies look with some trepidation at the rise of countries like China, India and other emerging economies. While the world's population is inexorably growing, populations in these developing countries are also finding a higher standard of living, which in itself will rapidly accelerate demand for sustainable water management by the companies within those countries.

The creation of a sustainable water management policy requires a company to fully understand its product lifecycle and how it may rely on companies or organizations, a supply-chain, which may be based in a completely different resource management environment. This could impact business strategy decisions and will require a level of education rarely seen before, as these issues of sustainability become more complex.

It's amazing to consider that, to this day, the majority of companies do not report their corporate sustainability positions. While much of the "noise" has been attributed to energy use and carbon emissions, only a minority publicly report their progress toward mitigation. It may be no surprise that far fewer organizations actually even possess a sustainable water management plan, far less report their position to stakeholders.

As executives spend many a late evening trying to develop a sustainable water management plan, many are seeking software solutions that will allow them to put together all their efforts. They need to see how one particular sustainability initiative may impact, sometimes negatively, another, while allowing them to reveal the big picture and plan accordingly.

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