Water is one of life’s essential needs. However, water crises are becoming more commonplace around the world as billions of people continue to suffer from a lack of access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene, while the risk of droughts is also becoming an alarmingly frequent issue across the world and is likely to become worse in the future due to climate change.
‘Water-stress’ is the term used when a territory withdraws 25 per cent or more of its renewable freshwater resources. Globally in 2018, just 18.4 percent of total renewable freshwater resources were being withdrawn. However, the problem is only due to become more widespread, with 44 countries facing either “extremely high” or “high” water-stress levels by 2040. Of these, Spain is predicted to be facing an “extremely high” water-stress level, alongside ‘high’ levels in Belgium and Italy.
Additionally, when looking at the World Map of Drought Risk, we can see that many countries across Europe have a medium to high risk including the UK, Czechia, Croatia and Spain. This shows that this is an issue that will affect our region and potentially our operations too in future.
It is, therefore, vital that we all understand that the efforts to reduce climate change are multi-faceted and not just about reducing CO2 emissions. In line with our dedicated Future in Action strategy, we must be working together to reduce use of water in our operations. Our EMEA water strategy is to minimise specific total water consumed wherever possible. As a necessary requirement to operate our business, we will adopt a hierarchy of sustainable water use where we reduce freshwater withdrawal and shift to non-freshwater use.
The poster on the UK News download page: FIA Water Strategy poster (1229 downloads) provides more detail to the strategy, and over the coming weeks we will be sharing further information about our key indicators, best practice in water saving from across our locations, and quick wins that sites can be actioning now.
Please share any ideas you may have to save water on our sites through the Ideation platform here, being sure to tag them with water management as their category – no action is too small!
Thank you for your support of this important campaign.