Business activities across the world not only include MNCs or big companies but also comprise of medium and small scale companies. Companies’ ability to measure and understand their water use and consequent risks and impacts is key to effectively mitigating specific water problems and becoming responsible water stewards. However, measuring corporate impacts on water resources and ecosystems may be difficult. While some companies are capable of regularly collect data on operational water use and wastewater discharges, translating those metrics into measures of local impact—on the water quality of the receiving body, on ecosystems, biodiversity and on people which may not be possible for some other companies.   It is because risk and impact assessments are largely based on a process often referred to as water footprinting or corporate water accounting – where companies use quantitative measures of water use and wastewater discharge as a starting point to assess impacts and risks, track the effects of management changes over time, and report this information to stakeholders. This process often includes an assessment of water use, water use efficiency (e.g., water use per unit of production or number of employees), recycled water use, and volume and quality of wastewater discharge throughout their value chain, including their own direct operations, suppliers, and product use. Now it is alright with most of the companies to carry out investigation on company’s water footprint until the same can be conducted within the company or facility or factory premises. But once  the company will step outside their legally held area, a number of issues, like cost factor, expertise, legal obligations, people negotiation , other social issues, political intervention etc. may arise which stops many willing companies to involve surrounding non-corporate stakeholders to involve in their sustainability initiatives. In addition to that lack of publicly available environmental information about surrounding river basin, watershed, forest area or environmentally sensitive ecosystem builds a number of obstructions infront of them. Same is the situation of social information like physical water availability, the proportion of available water currently being used by humans in that region, community access to water services etc.  A major MNC can still manage to combat all these issues but a relatively small company or a SME can hardly afford to manage all of those issues. Regarding supply chain management, it can be said that quantitative measurement of water performance including physical availability of water, in-stream flow needs, use of water in business operations and maintenance activities are monitored by a significant number of companies. Companies do it (or compelled to do) as part of their sustainability / environmental certification guidelines (like GRI, ISO 14001 etc.).  However, during risk assessment which is still typically largely qualitative, they aim to determine which facilities or value chain segments have the greatest impacts or costs, where water supply may be unreliable or insecure, and where water quality may be prohibitive. In this case profit oriented approach of businesses can be questioned but at the same we have to remember that doing business is their primary task besides taking serious attitude towards their social and environmental responsibilities. In recent years, some water resource specific guidelines are also available like AquaGauge, LWT etc. which have been helping companies to monitor their water risk more efficiently. Though these  tools have limitations as well: both LWT and Aqua Gauge are excel-based, requiring users to fill data into individual spreadsheets, instead of putting it automatically from digital control system or on broadly accessible cloud-based platforms.

Published November 12, 2016 12:05 by Abir Lal Mukherjee, Certification International (UK) Limited - Global Reviewer