17/07/2014: A world without water

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Two articles tackles some of the issues many large companies are facing. It raises the issues of water being used as free raw material and now organisations are realising how it can damage their brand, their credibility, their credit rating and their insurance costs.

As an example, the article discusses Google, which has installed a plant at one of its data centres in the US state of Georgia, which enables it to use diverted sewer water to keep its servers cool and at its Belgian data centre which uses water from an industrial canal. 

Google clearly has a focus on water conservation and it now has a facility in Finland cooled entirely by seawater and also looking at using captured rainwater in South Carolina.

This excellent article mentions Norway’s huge US$890bn oil fund, the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, is one of several large investors urging companies to improve their reporting. The fund is one of 530 investors with US$57tn in assets that work with the Carbon Disclosure Project, an international environmental charity. On behalf of those investors, CDP asks large companies each year to disclose the risks and opportunities water poses for their business. 

Last year 70 percent of the 180 FTSE Global 500 companies that responded said water was a substantive risk to their business, up from 59 percent in 2011.   

Adding to this, the report states in the most recent edition of the World Economic Forum’s annual global risk survey of business executives and other leaders that water supply crises were not rated among the five biggest concerns in terms of impact in any year up to 2011, but have been among the top three listed every year since 2012.

Chilling thoughts as the article states ‘Water scarcity is no longer just a small, plant-level issue for companies but has become a strategic question for senior management. The $550bn global water market – which covers everything from water treatment plants to pipelines – is expanding at about 3.5 per cent a year but it is growing much faster in some industries: as high as 14 per cent a year for the oil and gas sector and seven percent for the food and beverages industry.’

Read more HERE and HERE.

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This blog is maintained by The Aquaculturists staff and is supported by the magazine International Aquafeed which is published by Perendale Publishers Ltd.