The Water Risk Filter, a free online tool for wastewater assessment
When I attended 4th Water Stewardship meeting organized by WWF Myanmar, I found out an incredible free online tool. You do not need to be a water expert to use it. It is designed to be easy to apply by non-water experts to assess both basin and operational water risk for industry. That's made me fascinating to explore the tool myself.
The Water Risk Filter was launched in 2012 and it became a leading and trusted tool to help companies across the world related to their water risk. The tools might be useful for corporate officers, facility managers, and investors to check the impact of their business on water supply and potential risk exposures. On the other hand, we can obtain ideas for mitigating risk in a pragmatic way.
How do we know our company's water risk assessment?Under "Water Risk Assessment" tab, our companies' scores can be generated at a specific level by answering in the questionnaire. The questionnaire can be shared to another user, for instance a plant manager, who could enter the information. Some questions are direct risk indicators and some give help to better understand the water situation of the company. In that case, it gives you support on how to respond to water issues and alleviate some of the risks.
As a result, it shows aggregated risk scores as a heat map for the selected facility such as beverages producers, plant products industry, etc.
Detailed results such as physical risk, regulatory risk and reputation risk will be displayed at two different risks – company related risk and basin related risk.
The portfolio results can be seen as a matrix of all basin and company/commodity risks for all the assessed facilities. By hovering over each dot, the risk score will be displayed and can also downloaded as PDF or excel document and shared to others.
Learnt from the past
If we prefer to learn from water crisis and incidents of the past, case studies session from "Mitigation" tab might be helpful. Here is the interesting part again. It is possible to search the registered companies and industries. So if you register your company, other organizations can learn a lesson from you. Knowledge exchange is valuable.
Learn for the future
How do we know that? Or, how can we learn for our companies' prosperity?
"Knowledge base" might help us to answer the above questions. Water risk news, Water knowledge, water insight can be found. To understand or learn water risk, public policy guidelines, water disclosure global report, business market in water sector. All the publications are available as PDF.
I just want to end my explanation now, as I am going to explore the tool thoroughly more. I assume this tool is not only suitable for companies but also interesting for students who is working on a thesis, report or dissertation.
For more information on Water Risk Filter: http://waterriskfilter.panda.org/
For more information on Water Risk Filter in Myanmar, please contact Hannah Baleta (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Salai Thurazaw (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).
