Limitation of Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment: A Review

Abstract

Water is nature resource that is essential for all life, for the functioning of ecosystems, and also for the human society. Sustainable use of water resource is important for sustainable development of human society. Water scarcity can lead to conflicts between different water users. Therefore, several sustainability assessment tools were developed in recent years. Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment, which is a part of Water Footprint Assessment methodology, is one of them. Each sustainability assessment tool has its own limitations. It is important to know these limitations because incorrect application of sustainability assessment can lead to erroneous or improper decisions. In this article, risks connected to the Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment are reviewed and discussed in several examples. Individual parts are focused on blue, green, and grey water sustainability assessment. The article contributes to the scientific debate on limits of Water Footprint Sustainability Assessment as the key element of everyday applications, identification of needs of future research and subsequent development of new or improved procedures of sustainability assessment in the framework of Water Footprint Assessment.
 Keywords: volumetric water footprint; sustainability assessment; sustainable development; limitation of methodology

Grey Water Footprint of Contaminants of Emerging Concern from Wasterwater in Sava River Basin

“…It should be also noted that the calculation of the river basin pollution load in the form of a simple summing up of all GWFs of pollution sources in the watershed, as assumed by the Water Footprint Assessment Manual (Hoekstra et al, 2011, p. 87) neglects the self-purification processes of natural water systems and has other limitations, such as the practical impossibility of summing up all the various pollution sources emitting different pollutants and focusing on just one main pollutant in the river basin (Ansorge et al, 2022).…”