Building consensus on a generic water scarcity indicator for LCA-based water footprint: preliminary results from WULCA

Abstract

Consuming water can affect human health (e.g. by reducing availability of irrigation water and hence food availability), ecosystems (by decreasing water availability for terrestrial/aquatic species) and future generations (by depleting non-renewable resources). However, no standard method exists to quantify the stress on water without favoring any of these areas of protection. Stress/scarcity indexes have fo-cused on an anthropocentric perspective, and a few on an ecocentric perspective. We explore the possibility of developing an indicator considering the water resource as a whole and propose a method which is not centered on an area of protection but rather assesses the ex-tent to which all water demand and availability differ within a watershed (i.e. hydrocentric). This concept can eventually serve as a single metric to assess potential impacts from water use and be used consistently in the application of the upcoming ISO standard and for ecolabelling of food and energy products.