The City Council will soon start the tendering process for the technical assistance contract, the budget of which amounts to 65,000 euros.
Benidorm will measure its water footprint through a platform that will calculate the water demands of different economic sectors
González de Zárate points out that the results of the study “will allow measures to be taken for more sustainable management”
Benidorm City Council will soon start the tendering of the technical assistance contract to develop the Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan in the municipal area. This contract is part of Action Number 2 ‘Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan of Benidorm’, within the Sustainable Tourism Plan in Destinations ‘Benidorm Vision 360’, which in turn is included in the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, financed with funds from the European Union-Next GenerationEU. The study will allow us to know the water demands of the different local economic sectors to adopt decisions that improve the effectiveness and efficiency in management.
The budget of the Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan amounts to 465,000 euros, of which 65,000 are allocated to the technical assistance contract that is now being tendered and the rest to develop the actions of the plan. E
The line of action seeks the development of a web platform for the calculation of the territorial water footprint in the municipality following the principles, requirements and guidelines of the ISO 14046 standard for the evaluation of the water footprint (WF). “This study aims to calculate the water demands of the different sectors within the municipal territory and will include the individual analysis of municipal water use, water use in agriculture and municipal irrigation, the industrial sector and, finally, the impact of tourism on water management” explained José Ramón González de Zárate, Councillor for the Water Cycle.
The councillor has specified that the calculation of the water footprint will allow us to know “the total amount of fresh water used to produce the goods and services consumed in Benidorm” including 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. “This will allow us to propose measures to carry out sustainable management of the resource and establish strategies to improve the efficiency of water use” he added.
The contractor awardee will have to provide technical assistance for the calculation of the WF from this year onwards and will have to develop a web platform for the management of the territorial WF of Benidorm. This implies that it will have to carry out and audit the calculation of the water footprint, taking into account all the activities that it carries out in relation to the integral water cycle.
The calculation will be carried out using the guidelines established in the ISO 14046 standard, obtaining the blue, green and grey WF. The blue water footprint refers to the consumption of surface and groundwater resources throughout the supply chain of a product. The green water footprint is relative to the consumption of rainwater resources, to the extent that it does not become runoff, and is incorporated into crops or other green areas, returning to the atmosphere through the evapotranspiration of plants. The grey footprint is defined as the volume of fresh water required to assimilate the load of pollutants given the natural background concentrations and environmental quality standards. It refers to the water that is contaminated as a result of production processes.
The benefits of implementing the ISO standard to calculate the water footprint are several, as detailed by the councillor, who has cited “the evaluation of potential environmental impacts related to water, the identification of opportunities to reduce potential environmental impacts related to water, facilitates strategic management of water-related risk, improves water efficiency and optimises its management, provides information for sustainability decision-making for industry, administrations and NGOs and provides coherent, reliable information based on scientific evidence to report the results of the water footprint”.
With the results in hand, the successful tenderer will carry out an awareness campaign in which the results of the HH for the first year will be presented and an explanatory presentation of the territorial HH reduction measures will be made.
Finally, a web platform for water footprint management will also be developed, where the main results can be consulted, such as the calculation of direct and indirect WF, the calculation as a whole and individually for each economic sector, the calculation of the footprint typology (blue, green or grey), a map reporting land use (water demand) according to the economic sector and a historical evolution of WF since the first year in which the calculation is carried out.