Evaluating Facility Water Stewardship Performance in Context of Local Watershed Conditions

March 24, 2015 /3BL Media/ - As a ripple effect of World Water Day and in support of our ongoing water stewardship activities, the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER) released a new concept paper entitled Performance in Watershed Context.  With this release, BIER is building momentum towards creating a consistent and transparent process that will help businesses and watershed-level partners make more informed decisions with regards to water stewardship investments and actions.  With increasing pressure internally and externally to answer complex water-related risk and opportunity questions in a measurable and conclusive manner, BIER knew it was time to improve upon current methods and traditional water data.   

“Currently, our efforts to improve water stewardship beyond our own operations would benefit from practical tools -- tools that can take the complex landscape of water availability at the watershed level and translate it into information and insights that support risk mitigation and decision-making at the plant level,” according to Roberta Barbieri, Global Environmental Sustainability Manager, Diageo.  “This concept paper is phase one of our focus, as members of BIER, to fill this gap.”

This concept paper marks the first step towards BIER’s long-term goal to transition this concept into a practical method and decision-support tool to help businesses evaluate whether a facility’s performance, investments, and actions are appropriately aligned with the conditions of the surrounding watershed.  BIER partnered with technical advisors from leading water and environmental organizations such as Ceres, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Resources Institute (WRI) to help better understand the relationship between impacts and dependencies in the local watershed context. 

“With this Concept Paper, the beverage sector is once again demonstrating leadership by taking a challenging, but vital innovation head on,” says Nick Martin, BIER Water Working Group Facilitator. “While only time will tell, we believe this work will make the emerging concept of context or science-based metrics more pragmatic and directly applicable to business decision making.”

BIER has been championing water stewardship since its inception nine years ago, working collectively to share innovative approaches, developing tools and guidance, sharing benchmarking studies, and defining standards for leadership.  Over the next 12-18 months, BIER is committed to building out and testing a working methodology that will be targeted toward the beverage industry, but will also be available for other sectors and communities interested in advancing their water stewardship efforts.

The complete concept paper is available for download at www.bit.ly/BIER2015

About BIER

The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER) is a technical coalition of leading global beverage companies working together to advance environmental sustainability within the beverage sector. BIER aims to affect sector change through work focused on water stewardship, energy efficiency and climate change, beverage container recycling, sustainable agriculture, and eco-system services. BIER members include: American Beverage Association, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Bacardi, Beam Suntory, Brown-Forman, Carlsberg, The Coca-Cola Company, Constellation Brands, Inc., Danone Waters, Diageo, Ecolab, Fetzer Vineyards, Heineken, Keurig Green Mountain, Inc., MillerCoors, Molson Coors, New Belgium Brewing Company, Ocean Spray Cranberries, PepsiCo, Pernod Ricard, SABMiller, SealedAir, and Sun Orchard. For more information, visit www.bieroundtable.com