New Tool Devised to Measure Corporate Water Footprint

THETFORD CENTER, Vt. -- The nonprofit Center for Sustainable Innovation has come up with a resource that enables companies to measure their water footprint.

The tool called the "Corporate Water Gauge" is valuable, its creators say, because it takes into account corporate water consumption as well as the impact of usage on water supplies, the population sharing them, the geographic location, topography and watershed boundaries.

The tool is the result of a three-year research and development effort to "make triple bottom line measurement and reporting a reality," said CSI's Executive Director Mark W. McElroy.

"Given the increasing urgency of conserving and carefully managing rapidly declining freshwater resources on Earth, this is a management tool whose time has come."

Businesses can use the resource to assess water consumption and its environmental and social effects at a single facility, at all corporate sites or any subset of them, according to the center. The tool uses "sustainability quotients" to take measurements. More details are available here.

The Center for Sustainable Innovation, founded in 2004, works to develop advanced approaches for measuring and reporting the social and environmental sustainability performance of organizations. The center also devises tools and methods to enable triple bottom line management.