Benidorm presents a pioneering project to calculate the territorial water footprint and further adjust water consumption

Benidorm City Council, together with Veolia, the company managing the water cycle, and the certification company SGS, is developing a pioneering project to calculate the municipality's territorial water footprint. This study allows for a comprehensive evaluation of different types of consumption and differentiates, among other things, direct consumption, rainwater harvesting, and the pollution generated by each type of activity and its environmental impacts. The Benidorm BeCiTi innovation hub hosted the presentation today of the first results of this project, which are still provisional, given that "we are working in a very new field, where common parameters for a valid and applicable calculation are still being established," as highlighted by both the City Council and the contracting company.

The presentation took place as part of the events organised in the city for its Water Week, which coincides with World Water Day, celebrated globally on March 22nd, and whose program will run until April 1st.

The city's mayor, Toni Pérez, explained that when the study was undertaken, "our goal was to determine the total amount of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed in Benidorm," that is, "both the water directly consumed by the population and the water used in the production of food, industrial products, and other services such as tourism." And thus, once these measurements are obtained, "we can implement even more sustainable management of the resource and establish strategies to improve water use efficiency," which in Benidorm already reaches 96%, making it one of the most efficient water networks in the world.

The ‘Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan for Benidorm’ will allow us to “understand the water demands of the different sectors within the municipality and manage them better,” the mayor emphasized, also noting that it is being developed “in accordance with ISO 14046, which is not a water management standard per se, but rather a methodology for evaluating the water footprint based on life cycle analysis,” hence the participation of the certification company in the project.

Thus, among the measurements being carried out to analyse Benidorm’s water footprint in 2026 and 2027 are the individual analyses of municipal water use, water use in agriculture and municipal irrigation, the industrial sector, and finally, the impact of tourism on water management.

Toni Pérez stated that “sustainability and technology are once again going hand in hand” with the development of this project. “It takes courage to undertake projects of this scale and nature, which aim to understand the impact of human activity to act accordingly, thinking not only about those of us who live here and the millions of visitors, but especially about those who will live here in the future.”

Provisional results

For his part, the City Council's Head of Engineering, Vicente Mayor, was responsible for presenting some of the strategic tools being used, such as the collection of data and information on the volume of water demanded by each sector—green areas, residential, municipal uses, industry, or tourism—and the type of water consumed—from aquifers, surface water, rainwater, or reclaimed water. All of this is aimed at understanding how and when water is consumed and being able to model mitigation and compensation scenarios.

The municipal technician explained that the first provisional results for Benidorm indicate that the blue water footprint, which measures the volume of freshwater extracted from surface sources (rivers, lakes) or underground sources (aquifers), would reach 26.6 cubic hectometers; the green water footprint, which is the water used for agriculture from rainwater, reaches 2.3 cubic hectometers. While the grey water footprint, that is, the volume needed to dilute the pollutants generated in a production process to meet the required environmental quality standards, is only 1.7 cubic hectometers.

Thus, the sum of the three, which would give the extent of Benidorm's territorial water footprint, would amount, according to these provisional data, to 30.6 cubic hectometers per year, which translates to 405.5 cubic meters per inhabitant per year. This figure places the city well below the Spanish average, calculated at approximately 2,325 cubic meters per year, equivalent to a consumption of about 6,370 litres per person per day.

Finally, Ciriaco Clemente, Veolia's manager in Benidorm, also highlighted the value of this latest, still provisional, data and emphasised the importance of the project to be carried out in the city, as it will yield a "transparent, certified, and endorsed calculation" by a top-tier evaluation company, with measurement parameters applicable to any other scenario.

He also indicated that the next step in this roadmap, once the impact has been measured, will be to establish measures to reduce, compensate for, and communicate transparently, with particular emphasis on the second point: "We will know what needs to be invested in the recovery of water resources according to the impact of each activity," he stated.

The forum where this project, called ‘Benidorm, a path of water resilience’, was presented, concluded with a round table where Hosbec, BBVA and the Aquae/Veolia Foundation, together with iAmbiente, analysed the reality of the efforts to address the water footprint and congratulated Benidorm for this initiative to tackle the territorial water footprint and advance the data.

PSTD ‘Benidorm Visión 360’

The development of this ‘Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan for Benidorm’ is framed within Action Number 2 of the Tourism Sustainability Plan for Destinations ‘Benidorm Vision 360’, which in turn is included in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, financed with funds from the European Union-Next Generation EU. It has a budget of 65,000 euros, including VAT, and the contract included three lines of action: technical assistance to calculate and audit the territorial water footprint (blue, green and grey) of the municipality for the years 2025, 2026 and 2027, following the guidelines of the ISO 14046 standard; the development of a cloud-based web platform for the analysis, consultation and management of the territorial water footprint indicators for Benidorm; as well as the development of an awareness campaign, through the creation of a communication strategy that includes the results presentation, which took place today.

As you may recall, the Benidorm City Council applied to the extraordinary call for proposals for the 2022 fiscal year of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, financed by the European Union with Next Generation EU funds, with the Destination Tourism Sustainability Plan ‘Benidorm Vision 360’, which received funding of €6,103,783. This plan includes 16 actions, grouped around four strategic pillars: Green and Sustainable Transition; Improved Energy Efficiency; Digital Transition; and Competitiveness. The project to measure the water footprint falls under the first pillar.