When the UN defined the Sustainable Development Goals, it included, in the deployment of each of them, various indicators that would make it possible to measure the achievement or not of said goals. Thus, Objective 6, which sets the goal of guaranteeing the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, contemplates, among others, Indicator 6.4.2.
It is a system for measuring the amount of fresh water that a territory extracts in proportion to the availability of that resource. Based on this data, it will be possible to assess whether there is an efficient use of this asset in order to take measures to adjust it to availability and, in this way, ensure its sustainability. Thus, as Carlos Garriga, director of the We Are Water Foundation explains, it is a fundamental piece of information to prevent the depletion of aquifers; manage watersheds in a realistic and more efficient way; and anticipate scarcity alerts in high-consumption regions, such as cities and irrigated areas. “Measuring it has been an important step in raising awareness among governments and operators, which has had an impact on public opinion.”
However, the data is not only a value to be taken into account at the institutional level. “The data also affects the industry and the decisions it makes,” says Carlos Velázquez, director of Sustainability at Roca Group. In our case, we collect the data from official and international organizations to prepare a global water stress map water stress ranking that allows us to know these needs in all the regions where our plants are located. From there, we classify the 76 factories according to water stress codes and decide which ones require our priority action.”
“The project -explains Velázquez- pursues two main objectives: to help reduce water stress in the areas where the Roca Group operates, and to preserve this resource by optimizing its circular use.” The porcelain and faucet production processes require the greatest amount of water, which is why the company has started its global plan for these two manufacturing processes.
In Spain, the National Institute of Statistics is in charge of collecting the necessary data to calculate water stress. In general, it is the ministries responsible for water issues -agriculture, environment…- that are responsible for the collection and communication of the information that they transfer to Aquastat, FAO’s global information system on water resources and agricultural management. of the water. (http://www.fao.org/aquastat/en/). From the evaluation of these data, it can be deduced that greater water stress can have negative effects on the sustainability of natural resources and, consequently, on the economic development of a territory. If, on the other hand, the resulting data is low, it follows that in that country water management does not pose a challenge to its environmental and economic sustainability. But not always a low value is synonymous with good management. An extremely low resulting figure is a possible indicator of a country’s inability to adequately manage its resources for the benefit of the population.
