Smarter Organizations Prioritize Sustainable Water Management

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.

There would be two issues that need to be accounted for when it comes to 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 many factors that need to be considered in establishing 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. Considerably, this will have a major impact on business strategy decisions, requiring a good educational level that's never seen before, as sustainability issues are becoming more and more complicated.

It's amazing to consider that, to this day, the majority of companies do not report their corporate sustainability positions. Whilst more of the "buzz"on sustainability are attached to energy efficiency and carbon emissions reduction, a much lower focus is towards the 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 the key decision makers are spending long hours in the board room to develop sustainable water management plan, a number are already looking for efficient and reliable software solutions which would enable them to integrate all their efforts. They have to see how a specific initiative for sustainability would have an impact to another, in most cases in a negative manner, thus allowing them to expose the bigger picture that would eventually influence planning.