Why water is the Cinderella of the 21st century

Call it indifference; contempt, even disrespect or whichever word you choose. We treat water, the world’s most precious resource, with the same disregard that the Wicked Stepmother and the Ugly Sisters reserve for Cinderella in the children’s fairy story. 

Cinderella and water are maids of all work both in the story and in life, making just about everything possible with no acknowledgement of the value they add – or realisation of what would happen if they weren’t there.  

World Water Day is on March 22nd, and offers us the opportunity to be ‘water aware’, just as an alarm clock rouses us from slumber in readiness for the day ahead. 

We should start by thinking about how much water we use. The amounts are jaw-droppingly large, and are highlighted by Canadian environmental journalist Stephen Leahy in his book Your Water Footprint. 

Leahy draws attention to the work of Arjen Hoekstra, Professor in Water Management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, who coined the term ‘water footprint’. That teaches us about the indifference with which we treat water. Consider how familiar we are with the term ‘carbon footprint’, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth it produces… 

But I digress. What is a ‘water footprint’? It’s a representation of the amount of water we use, usually without realising it. Why would that be a problem, given that two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with water? Well, for a start 97% of that is salty ocean, so we can count it out, and we’re working with the remaining 3%.  

Hoekstra has calculated, and Leahy drawn attention to, the profligate way we use water. The calculation, considering the water used at every stage of daily life, is that the average American sucks up 8,000 litres of water every day! Only 5% of that -– 400 litres or less – is drunk, cooked with, or flushed. The rest goes into the supply chain to make and move stuff! 

Amounts consumed are much lower in other parts of the world because the water simply isn’t there. Even in the rain-soaked UK, at the fringes of western Europe, hosepipes are sometimes banned because demand for water outstrips supply. 

And that becomes a problem when increasing numbers of people put more pressure on the resource. Take California and the rising spectre of its ongoing drought. Drawn by the promise of the laid-back lifestyle, where the American dream is probably at its sweetest, migration there has doubled its population since 1979, but there have been no water infrastructure projects over the same time. Hence, today the shortage, and for the first-time people can trade on CBOE in California water futures. People are betting to profit on the impending disaster, including rationing! In India, Punjab is no different. Heading towards a desert in just over 10 years, because the water table has fallen from 20 feet to over 470 feet & dropping each day! 

But hang on a minute. That last sentence suggests that responsibility for the problem belongs to someone else; that ill-defined but somehow responsible group alluded to in the phrase ‘they should do something about it’.  

The truth is that ‘doing something about it’ is in my hands, and yours, as users of water. Consider the three most important things Leahy says you need to know about water. You rely on it more than you know. You use more than you realise. And you could use far less without much effort. 

Look at our pictures. That gull is drinking from a source that’s simply throwing water away, and a great deal of bare earth is visible where you might expect to see water at Lake Oroville, north of Sacramento. 

There’s far too much to say about the way we use water in one LinkedIn post. It’s something I’m passionate about, and a topic I intend to retrain to before World Water Day. In the meantime, let me leave you, for now, with this thought: If our water footprint created as much as angst as our carbon footprint, we’d look at water in a different light, and wouldn’t wash our hands (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the problem… 

At ExpenseOnDemand, we propose to create more awareness amongst senior management and senior finance people to relook at the ways their businesses are using or looking to conserve water. Write to me, if you have ideas or just want to brainstorm about this impending problem with workable solutions.