Food water footprint for hotels as a tool for sustainable water management . Exploring challenges and consequences

Abstract: Water is a crucial resource for our planet and a part of the accommodation sector´s environmental management. So far most attention has been paid to the direct water use such as for guest bathrooms, swimming pools and irrigated gardens. There is however also an indirect water use trough food and fuel consumption which has not been a focus for hotels environmental commitment but appears to stand for a significant part of the total water consumption. For successful environmental management are appropriate indicators of necessity. The concept of water footprint deals with direct as well as indirect water use for e.g. food products and reveals together with an assessment of local conditions the environmental impacts. This study focuses on the indirect water use of hotels trough their food consumption and explores possibilities of developing a food water footprint (WF) as a way to measure and manage this indirect use. The research question concerns which challenges might be involved in the process for a hotel to develop a food WF and as well which possible consequences for a hospitality organisation to implement a food WF there may be. This includes a discussion if a food WF would be an appropriate indicator for hotels indirect water consumption trough food and possible ways of its utilisation. To gather data two semi-structured interviews are held, one with the owner and another one with the executive chef of a hotel with restaurant facilities. In addition are as well four documents of cases where water footprint has been used to improve water management analysed. One conclusion from the empirical data that can be made is that it appears to be several challenges for a hospitality organisation to calculate their food WF. There seems to not be sufficient existing information from suppliers, and to conduct the calculations for hotels themselves tend to be complicated. A possibility to raise awareness regarding the importance of the indirect water use trough food might exist in using standard values of water use for victuals. To use a food WF for external comparison appears to be difficult but it might be useful for comparing internally. Development and applying a food water footprint seems to meet several challenges but do open possibilities to improve a hospitality organisation’s water management and thereby their environmental performance.