Corporate Water Accounting: An Analysis of Methods and Tools for ...

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Online Tools
As a free online offering, the WBCSD Global
Water Tool is much less expensive than either
WFs or LCAs to implement, and requires less
time as well. However, like those methods,
the amount of time and money required to
use the WBCSD Tool depends on the size of
the company, coupled with what it is attempting
to accomplish. As mentioned, the WBCSD
Tool can be used for a number of applications,
although for the Tool’s most common
application—mapping a companies’ and its
supplier’s facilities against water stress maps
(i.e., hotspotting)—a company typically needs
between a half-day-to-two-full-person days to
assess its direct operations and more days in
cases where companies have extensive supply
chains. Conducting this exercise requires no
special expertise; thus the only costs are those
needed to cover the employee’s time (Boffi,
2010).
Like the WBCSD Tool, both of the GEMI
offerings are much less expensive and timeintensive
than undertaking water footprints
and LCAs. That said, quantifying the time
and money needed for these GEMI tools is
more difficult due to their focus on building
corporate understanding of water issues
rather than providing specific quantified
answers. As such, reading the relevant guidance
in these tools could take less than a day.
Completing the Planner’s risk assessment
questionnaire is more demanding, but could
still be completed in 1-2 person days if the
company already has the necessary data relating
to their operations and nearby watersheds
(Van De Wijs, 2010).