WATER FOOTPRINT ANALYSIS OF DELHI TO UNDERSTAND ITS SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Environmental footprint and sustainability are gaining a lot of emphasis because of the increased burden on environmental resources due to increasing population density, increasing living standards, lower crop productivity in some regions, changes in diet pattern etc particularly in cities. The rate of consumption of environmental resources by human beings is much higher than the regenerative capacity of the environment. Environmental resources are fixed hence its allocation must be such that a consumer, group, region or nation gets sufficient environment resources for its development. Major environmental footprints are water footprint, carbon footprint and ecological footprint which can be used to account for human activities and consumption pattern. Major disadvantage of these footprints is not considering issues associated to sustainability like soil loss, forest loss etc. These issues are considered by sustainability indicators such as environmental sustainability index (ESI) which is a helpful tool giving values to sustainability from 0 to 100 (100 being most sustainable and 0 being least sustainable). In this report, studies have been carried out to find water footprint of Delhi and to estimate its future footprint using water footprint assessment method. Water footprint of Delhi in the year 2011 came out to be 4691 lpcd which is greater than Indian average water footprint of 4095 lpcd. Interestingly around 94% of water footprint of a person in Delhi is due to indirect consumption in the form of goods and services. Since there are no agricultural practices in Delhi, therefore around 91-94% of total water footprint of Delhi is being imported from other regions and only about 6-9% of the total water footprint is being supplied by Delhi Jal Board. Study of ecological and carbon footprint will give idea about the intensity with which citizens of Delhi are using environmental resources while environmental sustainability index will define how sustainable human activities are in Delhi.