Advancing the Water Footprint into an Instrument to Support Achieving the SDGs – Recommendations from the “Water as a Global Resources” Research Initiative (GRoW)

Abstract

The water footprint has developed into a widely-used concept to examine water use and resulting local impacts caused during agricultural and industrial production. Building on recent advancements in the water footprint concept, it can be an effective steering instrument to support, inter alia, achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) - SDG 6 in particular. Within the research program “Water as a Global Resource” (GRoW), an initiative of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, a number of research projects currently apply and enhance the water footprint concept in order to identify areas where water is being used inefficiently and implement practical optimization measures (see imprint for more information). With this paper, we aim to raise awareness on the potential of the water footprint concept to inform decision-making in the public and private sectors towards improved water management and achieving the SDGs.

Water Footprint and Life Cycle Assessment: The Complementary Strengths of Analyzing Global Freshwater Appropriation and Resulting Local Impacts

“…As impacts of water resource consumption differ depending on regional scarcity and socio-economic conditions, authors from the LCA community argued for impact-based assessments [11]. As summarized by researchers from the "Water as a Global Resource" initiative [12] some of those impact assessment methods estimate the local consequences of water consumption based on freshwater scarcity [13][14][15]. Other methods assess the effects of water consumption on human health and well-being (due to malnutrition [13,16,17] or infectious diseases [16,18]), ecosystems (terrestrial [13,19,20], aquatic [21,22], coastal [23], wetlands [24], urban [25]), and freshwater resources [13,26,27].…”

Agronomic practices in soil water management for sustainable crop production under rain fed agriculture of Drylands in Sub-Sahara Africa

“…Excess soil moisture has diverse negative influence on crops worldwide (Velde and Van Der Tubiello, 2012;Li et al, 2019), however, inadequate soil moisture is more serious and rampant than excess soil moisture in drylands of SSA. There are over 150 different indicators to measure water demand, water stress, water productivity, and water scarcity in different sectors, especially agriculture (Berger et al, 2021;Blatchford et al, 2018) (Table 1).…”

Circular Economy and Sustainability of the Clothing and Textile Industry

“…Fiber production, clothing production, use, and after use all consume an enormous amount of water and leaves traces of fibers and chemicals in water sources. The annual textile production consumes approximately 93 cubic meters of water per year (Berger et al 2021 ; Morlet et al 2017 ), which is equivalent to 37 million Olympic swimming pools. And, individually to make just one cotton T-shirt, it takes approximately 2720 l of water equivalent to what one adult would drink in three years (Chan 2020 ).…”