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- Publication #120
Measuring water use in a green economy
- Title
- Measuring water use in a green economy
- Author(s)
- UNEP
- Year
- 2012
- Type
- Journal Article
- Source
-
UNEP
- ISBN
- 978-92-807-3220-7
- Abstract
- Humanity’s key challenge over the coming
decades will be to meet the energy, land, water
and material needs of up to 9 billion people,
while keeping climate change, biodiversity loss
and health threats within acceptable limits.
Countries are already facing common but
differentiated challenges requiring a range
of solutions specific to each situation. A key
factor in determining which solution is most
appropriate will be the availability of data and
information on how much water is available
and how it is being used, and the frameworks
for assessing the distributional needs of each
society.
The International Resource Panel (IRP)
considers that achieving sustainable patterns
of consumption and production equitably
while maintaining the integrity of the natural
environment requires the decoupling of
economic growth from resource use and
environmental degradation. The two main
objectives of the panel are:
• to contribute to a better understanding of
how to decouple economic growth from
environmental degradation;
• to provide independent, coherent and
authoritative scientific assessments of
policy relevance on the sustainable use of
resources and their environmental impacts
over the full life cycle.
The IRP Working Group on Integrated
Sustainable Water Management is examining
ways of achieving decoupling through improved
water productivity, for example in the harvesting,
use and reuse of water, and of defining a
measurement framework for achieving efficient,
effective and equitable water use. This first
working-group report covers the analytical
methods and policy frameworks needed to
ensure that water use can be properly quantified
over the life cycle and integrated into decoupling
measures within the green economy. Following
this report, and using the conceptual and
methodological analysis set out in it, the IRP
will publish two further assessments – an
overview of the scope of the water management
problem around the world and an analysis of
the economic and social elements of water
productivity and efficiency together with aspects
of governance and institutional arrangements.
This modular approach aims to provide a
comprehensive overview of the policy options
available to implement sustainable water
management in a green economy in a way that
recognises water as vital natural capital while
at the same time developing a healthy and
productive water sector within an economy that
cares for and enables social equity.
The conceptual and
methodological analysis
As water availability is not only highly
dependent on the global hydrological cycle but
also on local and regional water management
regimes, much data and information need to
be brought together. Accounting is seen as a
crucial tool for the purpose of overall water
management and the generation of economic
assessments, alongside GDP growth and other
economy-wide indicators such as greenhouse
gas emissions. There is a need to address
ecosystem services within such resource
accounting schemes, to enable the links to be
made between resource efficiency, biodiversity
and ecosystem services and hence the
connection to the social values of water.
An important trend that emerges is a significant
and growing interest from the corporate world
in taking water resources into account when
considering future business. For public bodies
involved in determining water balances, there
is a need not only to produce quantitative
estimates of stocks and flows but also to assess
the impact of fluctuations and uncertainties
coming from the global hydrological cycle on
water abstraction licenses and access rights
and on the quality of water.
One of the key features determining the
balance between water demands and
availability is the emerging view of how best
to take the water needed to sustain the
many different types of ecosystem services
into account. One important conclusion
is that there is a common need across all
methodologies and approaches for data and
information at the river basin scale.
A comprehensive examination of the various
methodologies for quantifying water use
and environmental impacts, their underlying
assumptions and the context in which they
can be effectively used, forms the core of this
report. It considers water registers, water and
ecosystem capital accounting, water scarcity
and vulnerability indices, water footprint
assessment and life-cycle assessment.
Conclusions from this, and associated case
studies, are that:
• water registers provide a key to the fair
distribution of access to water;
• accounting can provide governments with
knowledge of how water, as one part of the
natural capital of ecosystems, is linked to
the economy and human well-being;
• water footprint assessment can
provide a tool for awareness raising to
highlight water issues in production and
consumption, especially in areas such as
agriculture and food industries;
• life cycle assessment and the various
standards associated with it can provide
benchmarking for industries; and
• water stewardship can help improve
quantification in corporate water
monitoring.
It is also clear that, while there are differences
between the various methods, there is a
sufficiently robust set of tools and methods
currently available to be able to include water in
all major economic and social considerations.
The report concludes that there is an absolute
need to asses water-resource use and
management against ecosystem resilience and
the limits of sustainability when developing
policy options in order to balance the competing
needs of water users.
It recommends that the environment’s water
needs should be treated as a vital priority in
order to ensure the steady supply of the basic
regulatory ecosystem services that underpin
the delivery of social and economically-valuable
provisioning services. In essence, water
ecosystems must function properly and make
clean and sufficient water available to ensure
food production – crops, husbandry and fish,
drinking water supply, energy and cultural
values.
Effective and targeted assessments depend
on open data access and optimal data
availability to function in a transparent and
equitable dialogue of relevant stakeholders.
The methodologies applied for the assessment
of resource use and allocation as well as for
the assessment and tracking of pollution
loads need to be transparent and comparable
between regions up and downstream of the
connecting water bodies and scalable between
the local and regional or pan-regional scales.
Further efforts are needed to provide this
comparability and the link between different
scales, as shown by the differences between
the accounting methodologies, life-cycle and
footprint assessments.
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