January 28, 2009—The Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) has released a new tool for measuring and reporting the sustainability of corporate water use. Known as the Corporate Water Gauge (.pdf file), the tool makes it possible to measure and report single and enterprise-wide facility-based levels of water use against local precipitation and population data for specific locations. The tool also takes into account local topographical features and watershed boundaries, again with specific geographic locations in mind.
The Corporate Water Gauge is the latest implementation of an advanced approach to sustainability metrics developed by CSI, known as sustainability quotients. Unlike other metrics, including those found in GRI-type reports, measures structured in the form of quotients take actual social and/or environmental conditions in the world explicitly into account, and are thereby able to put top-line corporate impacts into meaningful context, says CSI. In the case of the Corporate Water Gauge, water use is measured against both the volume of local water supplies and the size of the population that shares them, as opposed to simply reporting water use in a vacuum.
Of additional significance is the manner and extent to which the Corporate Water Gauge makes use of advanced GIS technology. GIS provides the data structure that links environmental and demographic information, and allows analysis and visualization of the combined dataset at a watershed level. Detailed topography models are thereby used to delineate the watersheds in which an organization’s water withdrawals and discharges are made, including those associated with municipal and/or regional utilities. Quantitative scores are then produced which measure and express the sustainability of an organization’s local and global water use.
