Practitioner’s guide online! Methodical and practical solutions to calculate the water footprint of companies

The joint project WELLE recently published the practitioner’s guideline “Organizational Water Footprint” which aims at supporting companies in determining their water footprint and minimizing it at hotspots along their supply chains.

The methodology developed by WELLE to determine a company’s water footprint considers water consumption at the production site, as well as indirect water use in the upstream energy and material chains. This enables companies to identify local hotspots along their entire global supply chain and the introduction of targeted measures to reduce the Organizational Water Footprint.

The guideline illustrates each step of the methodology with a practical example. In addition, the WELLE database and the WELLE tool are presented: while the database provides water consumption data of an organization’s indirect activities in a spatially explicit way, the WELLE tool supports users in implementing the methodology.

Finally, the guide highlights options to reduce a company's water footprint. This contributes to a mitigation of water risks, as well as to a more sustainable use of globally available water resources.

The “Organizational Water Footprint” guide is available for download here.