Measuring Water-Related Environmental Impacts of Organizations: Existing Methods and Research Gaps

Water scarcity is one of the most threatening challenges of the twenty-first century. Production processes have impacts on local water resources throughout their entire (often transboundary) value chain. This has been addressed in the last decade at the corporate level by developing and applying a broad set of approaches with different focuses and scopes. This paper reviews and evaluates existing approaches with the following aims: i) providing guidance for practitioners concerning the suitability of available methods and tools for different applications; ii) providing a scientifically robust criteria-based comparison identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches to stimulate future method development. Eight literature-based criteria for a suitable method for organizations are identified: documentation and transparency, scientific soundness, environmental relevance, organizational system boundaries, broadness of application, ease of application, stakeholder's acceptance, and transformative potential, specified by a total of 22 subcriteria. Nine existing approaches for measuring water-related impacts of organizations are evaluated accordingly. These show diverging performance. Based on the overall evaluation results, taking Water Footprint (ISO 14046) as a global information tool is recommended, in combination with the Water Stewardship approach, to link assessment results to concrete mitigation measures.