Nowadays, anyone can do almost anything from a smarthphone. One can order a cab, pay and transfer money, monitor a house, see the earth from outer space and find any location... These technologies allow us to do thing that were unimagianble just a few years ago. This sudden change is often called disruptive. And this disruption in technology opens a whole new world of possibilities in the field of sustainability.

Last June 13th, GSI was present at the event "Water Footprint as an indicator of efficiency and sustainability for a better water management", organized by IAHR-Spain Water and the Spanish Water Footprint platform ESAgua. The event, held in the Spanish ministry of Agriculture and Environment, served to show our framework WaterData4Action and the recently developed Geographic Agricultural Water Footprint Calculator (GAWFC).

El pasado martes 13 de junio tuvieron lugar en Madrid las jornadas IAHR – Spain Water sobre Huella Hídrica como indicador de sostenibilidad, bajo la coordinación de EsAgua, la plataforma española promotora de la Huella Hídrica a nivel nacional.  En GSI tuvimos la oportunidad de exponer nuestra experiencia, manera de trabajar y el reciente desarrollo de la calculadora de Huella Hídrica GAWFC.

La tecnología detrás de las aplicaciones que tanto nos gustan, a menudo se llaman disruptivas. Disruptivo significa que una vieja forma de hacer las cosas de repente se "rompe", se vuelve obsoleta y repentinamente, se abre un nuevo mundo de posibilidades, también para la sostenibilidad.

For one year now, in GSI we've been working for the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) secretariat, carrying out the practical implementation of the AWS standard in “Iberesparragal”, a citrus farm in the Guadalquivir basin (Spain), in collaboration with the German supermarket chain EDEKA and WWF. The implementation, which has covered 3 of the 6 steps of the AWS standard so far, is providing key learnings and showing the value of the practical use of different tools to help implementers working towards Water Stewardship.

This technical paper describes the practical insights gathered from the application of a methodology that seeks to use the current context of a basin as the basis for setting more actionable and realistic water targets.This methodology is illustrated using a Colombian banana farmer which is part of the supply chain of the German supermarket chain Edeka. While the start of this work pre-dates some of the emerging global conversations with respect to Context-/Science-Based Targets for Water – there are some lessons that could be beneficial contributions to the methodology development of Context-/Science-Based Targets for Water.

Download technical document: GSI Technical paper 4: Setting water targets based on catchment context