GSI Technical papers
Through carrying work for over a decade, we have build vast amount of experience especially in the field of sustainable water management. And because of our societal mission, we want to openly and freely share knowledge that we think is key to improve the sustainable use of water resources all around the world.
For this we are publishing GSI Technical Papers. The objective of these papers is to describe methodologies and approaches that we have developed and/or used in our work on sustainable water use. You can freely download the papers and use them for your own benefit.
The copyright of the GSI Technical Papers rests with its authors and GSI. The papers are 'open source' , this means that hereby the copyright on any of the papers is waived. When you use the papers, we would greatly appreciate that you acknowledge GSI and the authors mentioned by referencing to the paper, its authors and the GSI website.
In order to manage water for economy, people, and ecosystems, the catchment water balance provides fundamental quantitative information to describe the water situation in catchments.
The catchment water balance provides information on opportunities for water use improvements, supports the assessment of water risks, and facilitates site level water reporting. Furthermore, it is a key element in water stewardship implementation. Beyond that, it provides the foundation for water targets development.
For agricultural supply chain partners, it is very complex to define concretely what needs to be done to increase sustainable water use through the supply chain. The main reason for this is that supply chains source from producers in many different locations with just as many different water situations. The result is that there can never be a one size fits all solution that will generate sustainable water use in all locations.
Over the years, through our work with farmers and their supply chain partners, we have learned together how water use sustainability in agricultural supply chains may take shape. The result of this learning is the waterdata4action approach (WD4A). This technical paper lays out the WD4A sustainable water use approach in agricultural supply chains to enable practitioners to take note, learn, apply it and contribute to its further development.
Water risk is the possibility of an entity experiencing a water-related threat, either directly or indirectly. In agricultural supply chains, water risks are mostly related to the sites where the primary products are produced. As a result, it is in the interest of all parts of the supply chain – from retailer to trader to producer- to decrease the water risks associated with production sites.
Companies with global agricultural supply chains experience fundamental challenges in managing water risks. Supply chains are inherently complex as products are sourced from many locations, and each have their own reality in terms of water. To help addressing these challenges, a systematic and practical methodology is proposed to support global companies in effectively understanding and acting on water risks in their agricultural supply chains. The methodology combines a top down global approach to prioritize catchments with a bottom up local approach to validate risk score results obtained for the prioritized catchments and move towards action.
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
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