Virtual water - book review

Virtual water and the value of it

I was made aware of this book during revision zoom call and I began reading without a clue about the concept or its importance.  I was a little disappointed that I had to order the book twice, the first being from Amazon where the printing was completely off and I could only read 3/4 of each page!  However, I found a second hand version so I hope this has now been addressed by the Amazon distributer.

The concepts of blue water, green water and the way water may be traded goes beyond the specification of my current studies, however the book takes you on a story from explaining the concept and its origins to its possible future applications.

Tony Allan at the time of writing was pessimistic about whether his publication will impact the current geopolitics that are destroying the delicate balance of the global hydrological cycle.  Sadly, little has changed in the last 10 years with our obliviousness to the way we trade this "embedded water" continuing for the main part.

Firstly, what is virtual water?  This was originally known as "embedded water" and can be described as the water involved in the growth, trade and manufacturing of a product from the construction to the point of purchase.  This can be a little confusing to get your head around at the start, but to put it simply - just like a carbon footprint, everything requires a certain amount of water to get to your trolley. 

The final section of the book provides you with a table of embedded water values and I'd like to share some of the values that shocked me.

Coffee beans - 21,000 litres per kg

Beef - 15,500 litres per kg

T-shirt - 2,700 litres per kg

Apple - 70 litres per apple

A4 paper - 10 litres per sheet

Despite these values being hard to visualise, I find it useful to compare them to each other - the main shock for me being the amount of water involved in the fashion industry.  This is also displayed particularly well in a Stacey Dooley documentary (BBC Three - Stacey Dooley Investigates, Fashion's Dirty Secrets).

There are three main things I would like to address in my report as these are the three main things that have stuck with me.

The first is that I don't believe it is our lack of an environmental conscience that allows this issue to go under the radar, I think it's a lack of education and awareness.  Unlike the continued education on the importance of reducing our anthropogenic carbon emissions, I believe the general public really have no clue as to how much embedded water there may be in a product.  Even as a geography student, I had no real sense of how water is continually traded and which industries involved the most water.

Secondly, global shift has left many of the larger manufacturing economies now being located in Asia, the improvement in agricultural techniques in the advanced countries is having a very small global impact.  Of course it is brilliant that water productivity is now vastly improving and domestic water use per capita is reducing, the same progress is not being seen in most of the large export economies across the world.  Therefore, if we wish to really reduce our impacts on the current water stores, it seems sensible to start by helping the developing economies improve their water productivity before they export their products.

On a little more optimistic note, there is just cause to believe that we have the potential to balance the way we use our water on a global scale (similar to our approach about anthropogenic carbon emissions).  Despite the well resourced failure of hydraulic emissions across the world, I believe the continued improvement in water productivity can be incredibly important in achieving food security in tandem with maintaining sufficient water.  The key to this may very well rest on the lower income countries improving their agricultural techniques, however with the time-space compression, this idea really can be possible.  Like Boserup's economic theory, there is the idea that as technology improves and advances, we could continue to protect humanity despite increased demand and population growth.

Conclusively, I believe the best way to educate the public and raise awareness of the damage we are causing to the water cycle would be to include a "virtual water footprint" on the tags of products.  I accept not everyone reads the labels and that this may not be the solitary way to deter people from buying products with a high embedded water value, it would raise the awareness of the importance of the current way we are trading water. 

The book is incredibly educational and the case studies involved really help to contextualise this abstract concept.  More worryingly, the book was now written 10 years ago yet the majority of issues brought up are even more urgent and worrying now than they were back then.

Make up your own mind - the Amazon link is below!

Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet's Most Precious Resource: Amazon.co.uk: Tony Allan: 9781845119843: Books

Honourable mentions & further reading

- The impact of the textile industry on the Aral sea

- The USA hydraulic mission

- The Chinese hydraulic mission

- China's one child policy impact on global water security

- The unique story of Vietnam

- Egypt & the tributaries of the Nile delta

- Tony Allan and his extensive water research