Fresh water is an essential resource for human life, agriculture, and industry. How organizations withdraw, consume, and discharge water has numerous impacts on ecosystems and society. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides guidelines for water-related impact disclosure through its GRI: 303 Water and Effluents standard.
What Is the GRI 303 Standard?
GRI 303: Water and Effluents 2018 covers sustainability reporting guidelines for water-related impacts and how an organization manages those impacts. That includes both water consumption and water discharge.
Sustainability reporting under this GRI standard focuses on a variety of key areas, including prioritizing action in areas with water stress, understanding and responding to local social and environmental impacts, respecting the needs and priorities of all water users in an area, and aligning approaches and collective actions with other water users and with public policy, such as the Clean Water Act (CWA).
What Are the GRI Guidelines for GRI 303?
There are five disclosures within GRI 303 that cover a range of topics related to an organization’s water use and discharges.
Disclosure 303-1 Interactions With Water as a Shared Resource
This disclosure covers an organization’s withdrawal, consumption, and discharge of water with regard to water as a shared resource in their area. An organization must report an overview of water use across its value chain and a list of specific catchments where the organization causes significant water-related impacts.
Organizations must report both their own significant water-related impacts and those of entities upstream and downstream within the organization’s value stream. Significant water-related impacts can include suppliers of water-intensive commodities or services suppliers located in areas with water stress or suppliers with significant impacts on the local water environment and related local communities.
Disclosure should also include the tools and methodologies for identifying impacts, such as environmental impact, life cycle, or water footprint assessments. When information is estimated or modeled instead of using direct measurements, the methods used must be disclosed as well.
Stakeholder engagement is another fundamental aspect of this disclosure. An organization can describe how it participates in discussions with stakeholders, including:
- Suppliers with significant water-related impacts
- Users of its products and services
- Local communities and action groups
- Employees and other workers
- Other water users in its sector or industry
- Governments, regulators, and civil society organizations
- Global initiatives, trade associations, and partnerships
Disclosure should include details such as how the organization engages with stakeholders, frequency of discussion, outcomes of engagement, and future plans and goals.
Disclosure 303-2 Management of Water Discharge-Related Impacts
This disclosure focuses on minimum standards for the quality of effluent discharge. Organizations must provide information including:
- How standards were determined for facilities in locations without local discharge requirements
- Internally developed water quality standards or guidelines
- Sector-specific standards considered
- Whether the profile of the receiving waterbody was considered
The organization’s disclosable minimum standards are considered to be those that go beyond regulatory requirements in controlling effluent quality. Standards can refer to the physical, chemical, biological, and taste-related characteristics of water. Specific water quality standards can vary depending on an organization’s location, products, services, and national/regional regulations.
Disclosure 303-3 Water Withdrawal
This disclosure includes details on an organization’s water withdrawal, including amounts, sources, and information about any areas with water stress. The disclosure must also contain details regarding any standards, methodologies, and assumptions used in compiling the reported data.
Water withdrawal is reported in megaliters (1,000,000 liters) and is broken down for each source, including:
- Surface water
- Groundwater
- Seawater
- Produced water
- Third-party water
Additional disclosure must be made for water withdrawal from any of these sources in areas with water stress. Resources are available to determine areas with water stress such as the World Resources Institute Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas and the WWF Water Risk Filter. In general, water stress is defined as when the ratio of total annual water withdrawal to total annual renewable water supply is above 40% or when the ratio of water-consumption-to-availability is moderate or higher, meaning that the monthly depletion ratio is over 75% at least 10% of the time.
Water withdrawal from a third-party water source in an area with water stress requires the organization to request and report information from the third-party water source about its withdrawal sources.
An organization must also break down the previously described water withdrawal disclosures by freshwater and other water.
Disclosure 303-4 Water Discharge
GRI 303 also focuses on water discharge. Organizations must report total water discharge in megaliters for specific destinations, including:
- Surface water
- Groundwater
- Seawater
- Third-party water and the volume of this total sent for use to other organizations
This data must be broken down by freshwater or other water as well. Organizations must also report the freshwater and other water breakdown for discharge to areas with water stress.
Potentially harmful substances in effluents must also be reported. An organization must disclose:
- How priority substances of concern were defined, such as the international standard, authoritative list, or criteria used
- The approach for setting discharge limits for priority substances of concern
- The number of incidents or non-compliance with discharge limits
Organizations can also choose to report the breakdown of water discharge by level of treatment, including primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment.
ERA’s Water Management System provides an effective solution to monitor discharges and track them against discharge limits. Organizations can maintain robust discharge data to support GRI disclosure and federal and state environmental reporting requirements.
Disclosure 303-5 Water Consumption
Water consumption refers to water used by an organization that has not been made available again to local ecosystems or local communities within the reporting period. Water that has been withdrawn, treated, and discharged is not considered water consumption.
An organization’s water consumption can be calculated by subtracting total water discharge from total water withdrawal. Organizations must report:
- Total water consumption in megaliters
- Total water consumption from areas with water stress in megaliters
- Change in water storage in megaliters (if water storage has been identified as having a significant water-related impact)
As with other disclosures within the GRI 303 standard, organizations must also report the standards, methodologies, and assumptions used to determine these values.
Are You Prepared for Accurate GRI 303 Disclosure?
GRI 303 covers a wide range of activities related to water use across your organization, requiring accurate recordkeeping and calculations. Trying to compile this information manually can take up too much of your team’s valuable time and potentially lead to inaccurate reporting.
You can simplify your GRI 303 disclosure and other sustainability reporting requirements by taking advantage of ERA’s Corporate Sustainability Software. With a full range of prebuilt KPIs along with custom metrics, you can automate report generation across a wide range of sustainability topics. Book a discovery call today to find out more about how ERA can help your organization reach its unique sustainability goals.
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