People who are concerned about water consumption probably turn the taps off when they brush their teeth, take showers rather than baths, use water butts to collect rainwater and maybe even think twice about flushing their toilets after each use. And if individuals stop to think about water scarcity in other parts of the world, they probably (look out the window and) think Britain has plenty of water to at least meet its own needs. But are we missing something?

We’ve been so caught up with calculating our carbon footprints and measuring food miles lately that we’ve all but forgotten about the pressing issue of worldwide freshwater shortage. A new report by the WWF, UK Water Footprint, aims to change all that by revealing “the important, but largely unknown story
of the water we use and where it comes from”.

It’s a shocking tale: while the average UK citizen uses 150 litres of water a day directly, the ‘virtual water’ used to grow the crops that make the food we eat and clothes we wear tallies up to 4,645 litres per person every day. And even though we live in what seems like an extremely wet climate, 62 per cent of that water is sourced from other countries, in some cases further impoverishing water-scarce areas.

Already, the world is facing a freshwater crisis. According to Oliver Cumming of WaterAid: “Nearly a billion people lack access to clean drinking water and 2.5 billion don’t have access to adequate sanitation.”

Cumming adds that the effects of water shortage can be devastating: “Poor access to drinking water and sanitation impact on a whole range of diseases, many of which are leading causes of child death. So, beyond diarrhoea, there are acute respiratory infections, pneumonia and malnutrition.” Moreover, affected households must mobilise resources to treat diseases whilst dealing with loses in productivity. Educational opportunities go begging as “children are either out of school collecting water or are sick” or, in the case of girls especially, are withdrawn for lack of sanitation facilities. In terms of the environment, freshwater provides valuable benefits including sustaining ecosystems, regulating climate, providing protection from storms and mitigating erosion; when water is removed from the environment, these benefits disappear along with it.

Stuart Orr, Freshwater Policy Officer at WWF and co-author of the new report, says the publication “highlights the story about how water is traded through crops and who relies on whose water and who relies on whose food”. It also introduces a new way to measure how much water we consume.

Although the concept of a ‘water footprint’ has been around for several years, since Professor Arjen Hoekstra from UNESCO-IHE introduced it in 2002, it is being continuously refined. In the WWF’s report, water footprints (WF) are calculated by adding together the amount of local water used both directly to drink or wash and indirectly to produce goods, to the amount of global water used to produce imported products. Both parts of the WF include the use of ‘blue water’ from ground or surface sources, ‘green water’ evaporated from soil moisture supplemented by rainfall and ‘grey water’, the polluted ‘blue water’ returned after production.

The UK’s WF was calculated by analysing the water requirements of 503 crop and 141 livestock products, as well as the volume of water required to produce industrial goods in factories. Based on the WWF’s estimates, which Orr states are “conservative, if anything”, the UK uses 102 billion cubic metres of water per year, 49 times the annual flow of the River Thames – enough for every resident to take 50 baths a day.

Even more surprisingly, the report found we are only 38 per cent self-sufficient when it comes to water, making the UK the world’s sixth largest net importer of virtual water (after Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China and Italy). This may seem odd, given our weather’s tendency to mist, drizzle, shower and deluge, but we have a very high population density and, according to Orr: “It’s not just how much water you have – it’s what you can do with it.” Although we could certainly be more efficient with the water we have (by harvesting rainwater, say, or reusing grey water to flush toilets), our high WF is largely due to our meat and cereal-based Western diet and the amount of crops and products we choose to import, often things we “couldn’t grow here, anyway”, as Orr points out.

Indeed, apart from bovine and swine products (all of which, especially beef and leather, require a lot of water because cows and pigs are hungry and thirsty animals), the products most responsible for the UK’s external WF could not be grown in our agro-climatic conditions: cocoa beans, cotton, palm oil, soy beans, coffee and rice are not suitable to our environment, so other parts of the world bear the brunt of their production.

Cotton, for instance, is mainly grown in warm climatic regions in China, the USA, India, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, where freshwater is often a scarce commodity. The Water Footprint Network, which was set up earlier this year to promote the transition towards sustainable, fair and efficient use of fresh water resources worldwide, claims that 11,000 litres of water are required to produce one kilogramme of cotton textile and that 73 per cent of cotton is irrigated. This can have devastating effects on the environment: the WWF report cites the example of the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which between 1960 and 2000 lost almost 60 per cent of its area and 80 per cent of its volume due to over-abstraction from its tributaries for cotton irrigation. Twenty out of 24 fish species were wiped out and the fishing industry collapsed, taking 60,000 jobs along with it.

Parts of Spain (from which the UK sources many olives, grapes and oranges) Pakistan (which supplies the UK with rice and cotton), Morocco (which is trying to bring its cotton, cereals and citrus fruits to the UK market) and other countries are similarly at risk of freshwater shortage if something does not change quickly.

But apart from ceasing the practice of importing cotton, rice and coffee (and turning ourselves into a society of semi-nude, hungry and grumpy people in the process) what can be done to lower the impact of our water footprint? Orr is adamant that “relying on imports is not necessarily a bad thing” and in the report states: “The impact of an increase or decrease in the UK’s WF depends entirely on where water is taken from and when.” The key, then, is good water management.

Given that it’s up to each country to determine its own water policy, it’s a difficult problem to tackle. Orr insists that businesses, government and even citizens all have parts to play. “A lot of businesses are just waking up to the fact that they have supply chains all over the world,” he says, and have previously lacked an understanding of the impact of water use in production locations. As they come to grips with their sourcing practices, though, companies should maintain good water practice throughout these supply chains because otherwise they may eventually face water shortages in factories, increased raw material prices and reputational damage as public scrutiny increases.

Some businesses are taking the first step to reducing their impacts by admitting they have a problem. Marks & Spencer, for example, has been working with the WWF since 2007 to measure and understand its WF. According to Leisa Stewart, an M&S spokesperson: “We are looking at our clothing production and have already started to audit the water footprint of five crops – strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes and roses. In time, we will work with our suppliers to reduce our water impact through our product sourcing.”

If businesses with international supply chains make water management a priority, governments will have to as well. As Orr explains: “Governments around the world want to bring in investments. They want the kind of agricultural growth in their economy that will help them to develop or grow or create jobs. But at the same time, they’re recognising that if they don’t govern water better, then companies aren’t going to be attracted because companies are really thinking long and hard about where they do business and what it looks like.”

Our government also has a massive role to play in safeguarding the world’s water supply. According to the Water Framework Directive, as an EU member state the UK must restore to health the ecology of its waters by 2015. Ten per cent of rivers in England and Wales are at risk from over-abstraction, the primary driver of which is household consumption. Consequently, Orr advocates the use of water meters and consideration of water resources and liabilities in planning new developments: “Building houses where they make sense would help – trying to keep them out of floodplains and areas where you have to get water to and from them or where there are already huge deficits in drinking water, such as the South East.”

Beyond looking after our own ecosystems, UK Government can take many steps towards safeguarding the world’s water resources and Su Crown, a Defra spokesperson, assures us that her department is on the case. “Defra is looking at the issue of ‘embedded water’ [and] plans to work with a variety of organisations to explore these issues further in the coming months.” Moreover, the government has pledged to continue incorporating water management into its aid strategy. Crown continues: “The UK Government is supporting projects in Bangladesh, China, India, Sudan and Yemen, as well as five regional programmes.”

Meanwhile, citizens must help out by reducing the amount of water used in daily routines and wasting less food, as the 6.7 million tonnes of groceries we throw away every year represent embedded water loss on a massive scale. Orr says consumers can also “raise this and say, ‘We want to make sure that businesses that make a huge amount of money on the back of using a lot of water make sure that this is better managed and we want to make sure that our government cares about this issue’”.

According to WaterAid’s Cumming: “In many different countries where we work, it’s not so much scarcity which is driving lack of access to water – it’s driven by political factors. Often, there are sufficient water resources there, but the poor and marginalised are being denied access and the necessary investments and government actions aren’t there.” And Orr agrees, saying water “should be there; it should be deliverable.” Of course, if we don’t do something soon, the humanitarian and environmental situation will worsen as populations boom and adopt a ‘Western’ lifestyle and climate change increases, but both insist that it is simply political will that is needed to end this crisis.

Orr, for one, is optimistic: “The thing about water is, it’s actually something we can get right if we start managing it better, we start showing that we can maintain environmental function, we can provide for poor people and we can still grow our economies. It can be done, it’s just that it’s so low-priority and for so long it’s been underinvested in and seen as something that’s somebody else’s issue.”

The fact of the matter is that water management is everyone’s issue and it’s time we all start treading more lightly on the earth’s water resources.