Water Scarcity: A threat as big as climate change?

A report of the January 2008 meeting of the FEC’s Business Forum

Water scarcity will be one of the sharpest environmental, social and economic challenges of coming decades, and the food sector will feel this keenly. The January 2008 meeting of the Food Ethics Council’s (FEC) Business Forum discussed the challenges. The meeting was chaired by David Croft, Director of Conformance and Sustainability at Cadbury Schweppes plc and a member of the FEC.

We are very grateful to our speakers Tim Hess, Reader in Water Management, and Keith Weatherhead, Senior Lecturer in Water Resources and Irrigation, both from the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University.

Key points from the meeting include:

• Irrigated agriculture accounts for around 70% of all abstracted blue water.
• It takes between 1,000 and 5,500L to produced the food we eat in a day, depending on our diet. UK daily water use in the home averages 153L.
• The pressure food places on water resources depends where and how it is produced. The impact depends on more than just the quantity.
• Water stress will be made worse by climate change.
• Water is already a survival issue for some food businesses and commercial concerns are driving water efficiency.
• However, business responses are not necessarily in the public interest: there is a risk companies will simply cut and run from water-stressed regions.
• Embedded water is unsuited to labelling but there is an urgent need to standardise the water footprinting methods used for benchmarking and accreditation.
• Businesses should take part in wider social and policy debates about regulation, technology, land use and dietary shifts to mitigate water stress.
• ‘No regret’ adaptation and mitigation measures are a priority.