Restoring balance
How Water Restoration Certificates® Tackle your Water Impact
Water is essential to life, but it's a resource we often take for granted. With growing concerns about water scarcity, it's more important than ever to prioritize conservation and find ways to balance our inevitable usage. That’s where Water Restoration Certificates® (WRCs) from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) come in. Unlike anything else out there, WRCs offer a unique approach to restoring water to critical ecosystems, ensuring that your water footprint (from an event, organization or building) is actively mitigated. In this blog, based off our conversations with Heather Schrock, the Environmental Partnerships Director at BEF, we’ll explore why water conservation matters so much and how WRCs are leading the charge in ways that no one else is.
The Basics: What is a Water Restoration Certificate®?
If you’re familiar with carbon offsets or Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) you already understand the model for Water Restoration Certificates® (WRCs). But instead of investing in projects to offset carbon emissions or energy use, WRCs invest in projects that are protecting and restoring water habitat, bodies of water, and access to water. Here’s how it works:
Bonneville Environmental Foundation selects, funds, and develops water projects.
Then, to issue marketplace certificates, they conduct third-party verification each year through a water engineering firm, which validates the number of gallons of water restored per project.
The projects are then listed on a registry using the 1,000 gallons of water-per-WRC metric to split the projects into marketable credits.
From there users can invest in the credits as a way to balance their water use. Unlike carbon offset projects that are allowed to issue into the market for 15 years, WRC projects are only issued for five to ensure additionality is met.
The initiative grew out of their Business for Water Stewardship program, which focuses on custom solutions that support large-scale water balance or replenishment goals, such as those stated by Coca-Cola and Meta. Bonneville Environment Foundation designed WRCs to be accessible to a wider range of users, including those with smaller or less frequent water usage, contrasting the approach that targets scalable, large-scale water consumption. Both programs fund the conservation projects, with a secondary goal to raise awareness about critical watersheds and the depletion of water resources across the U.S. and now internationally as well.
Why should I offset my water use?
In recent years, the American West has been particularly hard-hit by water scarcity, with severe droughts affecting both urban and rural communities. In California residents have faced mandatory water restrictions as reservoirs hit historic lows, impacting everything from household water use to agricultural production. Similarly in Arizona, the Colorado River, a critical water source for millions, has seen drastically reduced flows, leading to water rationing and threatening the livelihoods of farmers who rely on it for irrigation and our food and raw materials supply chains.
Many water users may not see it yet.
“People turn on a tap and think ‘oh, I’ve got water. We respond to problems we can see, and there are 100,000 worthy causes. But water is in everything, not just drinking and showering.”
The more we understand our dependency on water, the more urgent its scarcity becomes. For example, did you know it takes 2,866 gallons of water to make a pair of jeans? Or 66 gallons to make one 8-ounce cup of coffee from Brazil?
While most organizations only account for and offset direct water usage, the embedded (or virtual) cost of the goods we rely on every day can illustrate how integrally we rely on water for our lifestyles and highlight the urgent need for innovative solutions like Water Restoration Certificates to address the growing water crisis.
What does a WRC do?
BEF works with specialty partners who perform the on-the-ground infrastructure engineering, restoration work, and legal frameworks. As the expert project developer, you can think of BEF as your guide for which projects need urgent attention and funding now. They create a menu of available projects under several categories, so you can choose one that is inspiring and meaningful to your organization.
Restoration of Natural Systems
Probably the most popular and easily understood type of project, these efforts focus on restoring wetlands, improving water flows, and enhancing habitats. Focusing on areas of degradation, drought, or habitat loss, they conserve and bring back riparian zones, reduce nutrient runoff, and conserve biodiversity through habitat maintenance.
Improved Efficiences
These pertain to agricultural practices such as implementing drip irrigation and lining canals. Up to 50% of uncovered canal water can evaporate or seep and controlling floodgates on large swaths of land could requires traveling hundreds miles to manually open or close gates – which means excess water can be flowing through in the meantime. Improvements to these systems result in having more water left in the natural system, while also providing benefits for agricultural use and even fire protection.
Restore Flows
This type of project is a little tricky to understand. Historically in certain regions of the US, water rights are granted to users in a “use it or lose it” way, which means if a user does not extract all the water from a natural source that they’re legally entitled to, the following year they could have their legally allotted amount of water decreased. This rule was put on the books before environmental concerns became a priority. Now, BEF’s program partners work to establish legal agreements with water rights holders that essentially allows them to “rent” unused water. And what does BEF do with the water they rent? They leave it right there in the natural habitat in a process known as “avoided extraction.” This also prevents the water rights holder from losing their original allotment.
How much should I invest?
Theoretically, you should be purchasing a one-to-one ratio of gallons used to gallons restored. However, it can be challenging to get an exact number for water usage for the duration of an event and you might have to estimate. Another option is to make an educated commitment based on number of attendees, such as 1,000 gallons per participant, or to commit to a flat rate.
No matter the approach, it’s easy to make grandiose claims that make your genuinely commendable efforts look like greenwashing. Don’t claim to be “neutral” unless you feel confident you can back it up irrefutably with accurate data. Making generalized commitments or purchasing based on estimates are legitimate approaches as long as you are transparent.
Make it a priority
While carbon offsets and RECs often receive more priority when we look at mitigating impacts, we should be prioritizing water as part of our portfolio as well. Heather Schrock says, “Water is life. Water is everything. We cannot live without water.” And yet, water scarcity, drought, habitat and biodiversity degradation and related concerns are very real issues that affect human communities daily. For large-scale but infrequent users, like events, WRCs provide an innovative and user-friendly solution to address water consumption.