Sustainable Water Management Is As Big A Risk As Carbon

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 are called before corporate boardrooms to explain how the company should approach sustainable water management. This is a difficult problem to understand in the beginning, as we have, over the ages, considered water to be essentially a free resource. This is probably why we're so bad at allocating real worth to its value, despite the fact that we rely on it for the production of almost everything.

There are two issues associated with sustainable water management. Population growth is the most significant, especially when you consider that the world's population will top 9 billion people by 2050, a banner year when global sustainability efforts are focused. Population growth like this will put huge demands on freshwater availability. On the other hand, global warming has been exacerbated by our unsustainable energy use and approach to living and associated temperature change will mean that the amount of water naturally distributed will be reduced.

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.

Companies must think in global terms when they create a sustainable water management policy and really understand the pressure points within the product lifecycle. Reliance on supply chain organizations could be an issue, as these companies could be located within a completely different resource management environment. Levels of education rarely seen before will be called for as complex sustainability matters impact business strategy decisions.

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.

Software solutions can come to the rescue of harried executives that are spending many a long hour trying to develop a sustainable water management plan. There are so many individual sustainability initiatives required that there's a danger that one effort may negatively impact another. It's important to be able to see the big picture, in order to plan accordingly.

by: Daniel Stouffer.

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