The Virtual Water Project

By now you’re probably familiar with the concept of carbon footprints, but if you’ve ever wondered how much water is required for the production of the food you eat, then the visually stunning double-sided poster by German designer Timm Kekeritz, will provide a worthy introduction to the concepts of virtual water and water footprints. As defined by Waterfootprint.org, the result of collaboration between the Universtity of Twente and the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Holland, virtual water refers to the “volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced” or the “sum of the water use in the various steps of the production chain”, and water footprint represents the “total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business.” The terms were coined by Professor John Anthony Allan of King’s College London in 1998, and led to a number of studies, including one in 2004 by Arjen Hoekstra and Ashok Chapagain, the data from which Kekeritz created his poster. On one side of the Poster are depicted the water footprints of various countries (featuring import/export of virtual water and per capita consumption), and on the other side are the virtual water contents of various foods and commodities.

Although there is some criticism of employing the concept of virtual water as a measure of water usage and a way to determine water policy, – a topic far too complex on which to elaborate in a brief blog post – the concept certainly brings to light the fact that fresh water is a scarce, and many say dwindling resource, a concern about which we should all be conscious. With this poster, Timm Kekeritz hopes to bring to the forefront this very issue, and he has already garnered a great deal of positive press for his efforts. One may purchase the poster directly through the site, and visit Waterfootprint.org for a more in-depth description of all of the concepts involved and to try their Footprint Calculators to determine your National or Individual water footprint.

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