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Besides meeting net-zero goals, organizations must lower their water footprint to decrease disruption risk and ensure accessible clean water.
FORMATE CA: Companies worldwide have begun to adjust their operations to achieve their net-zero targets. While these steps to mitigate their carbon footprint are important, the environmental challenges of water scarcity and poor water management are also significant.
Increasing water scarcity — people having fewer than 1,000 cubic meters of potable water annually — puts businesses and their supply networks at risk of disruption. Moreover, as governments struggle to protect drinking water for their populations, the deficiency of accessible clean water is hurting the viability of industrial activities and rising taxation .
As per the United Kingdom, pure water quantities will drop by 50% to 80% by 2050, while Germany's higher water charges affect the region's agricultural businesses' economic sustainability.
Water resources have historically been debased, contributing to inadequate tracking and control of water usage. However, industries and agriculture facilities can raise this statistic to a KPI as required as greenhouse gas emissions by implementing current technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and remote sensing to quantify water usage across the supply chain.
For example, remote sensing and satellite monitoring have been employed in agriculture to help farmers better plan irrigation procedures by offering detailed real-time tracking of their farmed regions to leverage weather conditions and local topography. The awareness gained could lead to automatic irrigation schedule adjustments to match everyday fluctuations in water supply with the crop's water requirements.
Several companies don't control clean water waste and leakage since operating runoffs aren't considered a source of pollution in most nations, and water waste isn't regulated. Nevertheless, if clean water becomes scarcer, we anticipate this will alter, as it will become inextricably linked to guaranteeing operational safety.
This is especially true in sectors that depend on clean water for their manufacturing operations. Companies may be compelled to adjust their production lines using technologies that raise costs or decrease the quality of the items generated in one scenario. More harmful, a lack of clean water will likely increase resource expenditures, directly influencing operating costs.
