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My Water Footprint

Introduces two ideas: your water footprint, and the water hidden inside everything you buy.

How it runs

The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.

  1. 01

    Put four things where everyone can see them: a glass of water, a cup of tea, a plate of rice and a cotton shirt.

  2. 02

    Ask the class to put them in order, from the one that took the least water to make to the one that took the most. Not litres — just the order. Let them argue about it.

  3. 03

    Then take them one at a time, out loud. The glass is the water itself. The tea adds the water it took to grow the leaf, the sugar and the milk. The plate of rice adds a whole flooded field.

  4. 04

    The shirt is the long one. A cotton crop, watered for months. Then the water used to dye and finish the cloth. Then the water it would take to clean up what the dyeing let out. Nobody in the room can give the litres, and that is the lesson: the water inside a thing is real and large, and invisible unless somebody measures it and publishes the figure.

Talking about it

Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.

Points for discussion

Now separate direct use from indirect use, and bring in the words. Points to land:

  • A water footprint works like a carbon footprint. It measures the volume of fresh water used across everything it took to produce something — a shirt, a meal, a car, a harvest, a company's year, a whole country's consumption.
  • The idea was set out in 2002 by Arjen Hoekstra, then at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. The point of it was to make visible how much water our habits actually take. The Water Footprint Network splits a footprint three ways, by where the water came from. Green: rain held in the soil and taken up by plants — the main one for crops, orchards and forests. Blue: water drawn out of a river, a lake or an aquifer, then evaporated, built into the product or discharged. Grey: the fresh water it would take to dilute the pollution the process caused, down to the level the standard allows.

Where this comes from

Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.

Adapted by Swechha from a lesson plan published by watercalculator.org (https://www.watercalculator.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/WF_HS_L2-Lesson-Plan.pdf) and an explainer by Iberdrola (https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/what-is-water-footprint). The American consumption figures in the original are not carried here.

Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.

Next

Where to go from here.

Next session

Saving Water At HomeWater, Water, Everywhere, 4 of 8

The theme

Water, Water, Everywhere8 sessions and the background reading

All eight themes

Teach43 sessions across 8 themes

Understand the data

The whole library · the A to Z