Next target is your water footprint

Marie Woolf, Whitehall Editor
ENVIRONMENTALLY conscious consumers already fret about how to cut their carbon emissions. Now Whitehall officials plan to urge the public to reduce the amount of water they use because of worries about the West sucking up supplies from some of the world’s driest countries.
The government has commissioned research to audit everyday items from a morning cup of coffee to a bag of carrots according to the volume of water used in their production.
Eventually products could be labelled with this number.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which has set up a water footprint steering group, wants to broaden public awareness of climate change to include water supplies.
Defra believes consumption could be cut if shoppers were aware of how much is used to produce common items. A takeaway latte, according to figures already gathered by officials, requires 200 litres (44 gallons) to grow the coffee beans, transport them and serve the coffee in the cup. It takes another 2.5 litres to make the plastic lid for a takeaway latte.
A cotton T-shirt with a slogan on the front uses an estimated 4,000 litres.
The new research will assess items both for how much water they use and for the impact on the country where they are produced. This could mean, for example, that a product imported from a dry country would be rated worse than one from a place where water was plentiful.
In Morocco, for example, irrigation for exported products has lowered the water table so much it could reduce future supplies.
Beans grown in Kenya, where supplies are short, take up water that could otherwise have been used for local food production.
An internal Defra report says world water security is a big concern for the future and could one day affect Britain’s food supplies.
“There is already sufficient evidence for water-scarce regions (Spain, North Africa, South Africa, Australia) to suggest current production levels for export of many commodities are unsustainable,” says the report.
Rob Lillywhite, an environmental scientist at Warwick University who has been commissioned by the government to conduct the two-year study, said: “Labelling products would be a useful way of informing consumers of the water used in production. Defra are taking this issue very seriously.”
The government is also looking at water security in Britain. Southeast England is so densely populated that it has less water per person than Morocco, Sudan or Syria.