The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society

By Arjen Y. Hoekstra. 2011

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Water is not only used in the domestic context, but also in agriculture and industry in the production of commercial goods, from food to paper. The water footprint is an indicator of freshwater use that looks at both direct and indirect use of water by a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business. This book shows how the water footprint concept can be used to quantify and map the water use behind consumption and how it can guide reduction of water use to a sustainable level. With a number of case studies, it illustrates water use along supply chains and that water consumption at one place is often linked to water use at another. For example, it is calculated that it takes 15,000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of beef, or 8,000 litres of water to produce a pair of jeans. The book shows that imports of water-intensive products can highly benefit water-scarce countries, but also that this creates a dependency on foreign water resources. The book demonstrates how water-scarce regions sometimes, nevertheless, use lots of water for making export products. It raises the issue of sustainable consumption: how can consumers, businesses and governments get involved in reducing the water footprints of final consumer goods?

Subfields: Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49965b9df7a17486a3ac7880af101dcfe94f4085

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Citations in the corpus

Humanity’s unsustainable environmental footprint (2014, background): “These issues need to be addressed to enable meaningful comparisons between companies and benchmarking based on best available technology and practice (32, 35).”
Review and classification of indicators of green water availability and scarcity (2015, background): “Although freshwater is renewable, this does not mean that its availability is unlimited.10 In fact, freshwater is also a finite resource (Hoekstra, 2013).”
The water footprint of Tunisia from an economic perspective (2015, background): “Blue WP is defined as the additional yield obtained through irrigation divided by the volume of blue water (irrigation water) consumed (Hoekstra, 2013).”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “This practice is known as deficit irrigation in that it leaves crops in a water deficit state (Hoekstra, 2013).”
Evolving water science in the Anthropocene (2013, background): “Water concerns and constraints need to play a role in agriculture and other policies (Hoekstra, 2013).”
Sustainable food consumption: an overview of contemporary issues and policies (2013, background): “These issues have also been taken up by experts in water footprinting, a field that highlights the degree to which embodied water resources reflect inequitable trade flows (Hoekstra, 2013).”
Rethinking Agricultural Trade Relationships in an Era of Globalization (2015, background): “Research on embodied water trade demonstrates many examples in which trade occurs despite relative disadvantages in terms of water availability, possibly because of inadequate water pricing (Hoekstra 2013).”