Talk:Water footprint

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2019 and 11 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Coycca Gonzales, Fawizzle, Camille Ponzu. Peer reviewers: Anonymous Lotus.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 January 2020 and 22 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Geoffrey Luoma. Peer reviewers: Kayleemessina, S.tahl93, Guillermodominguezjr.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2021 and 20 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mtorre2vu.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:43, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Water use is basically water footprint
I do agree that water use is somewhat overlapped with different water consumption related articles. However, the main point of this article is water footprint. I rearranged the content, as well as added case studies here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hochingli (talk • contribs) 01:49, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Water use by country
Water use by country is an important topic area that should be covered by this article. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 21:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Where to merge, etc
I've only come to this article to stub-sort it, from Category:Stubs, but had a look at the Afd and explored further. It looks to me as if Water consumption, which currently redirects to Drinking water should perhaps redirect to something more general, as I'd think that "Water consumption" includes industrial and agricultural uses as well as human consumption. And Water efficiency, which wasn't mentioned in the AfD, seems to overlap too. Perhaps Water needs a project, and a sidebox with links to related articles - it's such a key topic for human survival on the planet, such a key aspect of majority world poverty, and such a likely cause of international conflict too. PamD (talk) 15:39, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Unused source
I moved the following reference from external links to here in case someone wants to incorporate it into the article.

Nature article (August 2012), Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint, http://www.hydrology.nl/mainnews/1-latest-news/365-water-balance-of-global-aquifers-revealed-by-groundwater-footprint.html. Joja lozzo  19:48, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

You can also include in the definition of water this in: Human uses - Agriculture. May be important to understand how to regulate climate and to add this on de water cycle.

From France Wikipédia translation: Section use on agricole sector :

"Agroforestry and hedgerow are both solutions to build micro-climates and allow the circulation of water go all the way inland thanks to the phenomena of evapotranspiration of plants. For example, one hectare of beech forest, which consumes 2,000 to 5,000 tonnes of water per year, yields 2,000 tonnes per evaporation."

Sources: ONF, https://www.onf.fr/onf/forets-et-espaces-naturels/+/1f::comprendre-la-foret.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.23.199.52 (talk) 11:17, 12 January 2020 (UTC)

Important omissions
The notion that “Water use is basically water footprint” (suggested above), seems to be responsible for many of the problems in this article. One would like to see a much less narrow perspective in an article with the title “Water use”. With its almost exclusive focus on water footprints, the article wholly ignores important non-consumptive uses of water and ignores several important measures of water use. There is no mention of environmental use of water. (As an example of its quantitative importance, environmental use accounts for about 48 percent of California’s dedicated water use in an “average” water year.) The article ignores most sectoral allocations of water, although the article’s introduction does make an egregiously erroneous claim about agricultural water use in addition to an ambiguous claim. (The latter states ‘From 1900 to 2000, water use for agriculture went from about 500 to 2,500 cubic kilometers per year,’ but we are not told whether this refers only to withdrawn water use, or whether it also includes “green water” use.    Schafhirt (talk) 18:54, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Erroneous and problematic claims
The article’s claim that agriculture uses 70 percent of water resources is an extreme error. The source cited is a newspaper article, not an authoritative source on water use. Agriculture accounts for nearly 70 percent of global withdrawn water use, but this is far less than 70 percent of water resources. In fact, agricultural use of withdrawn water is about 6 percent of global renewable freshwater resources annually, and about 4 percent of the precipitation falling on land is used in rainfed agriculture. These figures are supported by global data compiled by the FAO’s AQUASTAT. A table of figures in the article is preceded by a statement attributing the figures to “Research by the Cranfield University” in the UK. However, two of those figures clearly came from Australian research. (See: Ridoutt and Pfister. 2010. Global Environmental Change 20: 113-120). Rather than citing an authoritative publication presenting such figures,  the Wikipedia article simply cited a news media publication, using a now-dead link. Unless some editor can check all the figures, cite a credible source for them, and write an accurate comment about them, the statement and the data should be deleted. In that case, the data could be replaced by figures from the WFN. The article claims that “The water footprint of a product is the total volume of freshwater used to produce the product.” Applied to agricultural products, this claim tends to mislead readers, because it does not acknowledge that in many cases, the footprint is the volume of water use associated with production of the product, rather than the water use that would be assignable to production of the product. Schafhirt (talk) 18:58, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Another claim is: "An individual’s daily diet of fruits, vegetables and grains requires more than 1,500 litres (396.3 US gal) of water, as compared to 3,400 litres (898.2 US gal) needed for a daily diet rich in animal protein.[21]"  This comes from a newspaper source, but the link given no longer provides access to the article.  Thus one cannot determine whether the figures originated from an authoritative source, and if so, what that source was.  As the same article was cited for an extremely erroneous claim regarding agricultural water use, the cited source cannot be considered reliable.  Moreover, there is no explicit indication of what the figures mean.  (Are they based on water footprints, or on some other measure of water use?) For these reasons, the claim should be deleted.  It might be restored if appropriately described, verified and accompanied by a better citation, or alternatively, it could be replaced by data from another source.   Schafhirt (talk) 21:22, 18 June 2015 (UTC)


 * The article claims, “The more food comes from irrigated land, the larger is the water footprint.[11]“ The claim uses a spurious reference citation. Nothing in the cited reference supports the claim, and the character string “irrig” does not even appear there.  WUE (water use efficiency) is a measure of crop production per unit amount of water used by evapotranspiration where a crop is grown.  Examination of research literature from numerous regions in the world shows that WUE is often higher where irrigation is used.  In some environments, irrigation may confer no benefit if done at some stages of crop growth, but failure to irrigate at all during crucial stages can result in greatly reduced yield, resulting in reduced WUE (Kadayifci et al.  2005.  Agric. Water Mgt. 72: 59-68.)  Irrigation, in some cases as “full” irrigation, and in other cases as “deficit” irrigation, has often been shown to result in increased WUE (Anwar et al.  2003.  J. Agric. Sci. 141: 285-301; Yazar et al.  2002.  Irrig. Drain. 51: 293-300; Chaves et al. 2007. Ann. Appl. Biol. 150: 237-252; Tavakkoli and Oweis. 2004.  Agric. Water Mgt. 65:225-236; Sakellariou-Makrantonaki et al. 2007.  Agric. Water Mgt. 90: 180-189 ).  Because the Wikipedia claim uses a spurious citation and is inconsistent with results of several studies, it should be deleted.  Schafhirt (talk) 23:48, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Title is misaligned with contents
A more precise title for this article should be "Water footprint". The term "water use" is a generic term and it has multiple meanings depending on whether it is used in hydrologic, engineering or regulatory contexts. "Water use" could mean total water withdrawals from different supply sources, water withdrawn or diverted and put to beneficial use, finished drinking water produced by water providers (utilities), water sold to customers through metered connections, and many other meanings. In the professional literature the phrase “water use” is often used as a generic term with the its meaning defined by the context. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DziegielewskiBA (talk • contribs) 15:45, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Keep user in mind
I agree with everything stated in the previous comment. For several reasons it is better to rename this article Water footprint. If anybody is inclined to structure the fuzzy concept of "water use" into a separate article, by all means do it. But that would be a very different article altogether, of an almost philosophical nature, for all the reasons given above. The well-documented and clearly definable concept "water footprint", however, warrants extensive coverage on any Wikipedia, especially the English language one. The thought of people all over the world, trying to find out what "water footprint" means, being redirected to a page called water use on English Wikipedia, is embarrassing. -- Sampa (talk) 23:49, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree, so let's do it! Who can remember how to rename a page? I think it's the "move" template that needs to be used. Ping Sampa EMsmile (talk) 14:11, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 16 February 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: Moved to Water footprint, assisted by Mz7 Ⓩⓟⓟⓘⓧ Talk 03:01, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * asked me to complete the histmerge that was suggested in the discussion. As always, histmerges are complicated and can sometimes result in confusing histories. Here is a summary of what I have done to hopefully reduce confusion:
 * All of the revisions of this article ("Water footprint") prior to 20 March 2012 were originally added at the "Water footprint" title.
 * All of the revisions of this article from 20 March 2012 until 16 February 2018 were originally added at the "Water use" title and have since been moved to the "Water footprint" title.
 * All of the revisions of the now-redirected title prior to 9 March 2012 were originally added at the "Water use" title.
 * If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me. Respectfully, Mz7 (talk) 03:03, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Water use → Water footprint – proposed title better relects article content. New title agreed by consensus on talk page.  Velella  Velella Talk 22:58, 16 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Support per nom. The article is almost entirely about the concept of "water footprint" and not water use in general.  The two articles were separate before a 2012 merger but there was never much substance to the previous water use article.  Therefore, if this move is approved, I request the closing admin perform a HISTMERGE to keep the pre-2012 edit history with this article.  —  AjaxSmack  12:29, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Support per AjaxSmack, and with his proposed history merge, where most of the true article's contribution history resides. MarginalCost (talk) 14:50, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
 * This should happen, and actually the page was moved by cut-and-paste from Water footprint in 2012. Unfortunately, there is also significant history for this page before that period. It's not really worth saving as an article, but before the cut and paste "Water use" looked like this. Dekimasu よ! 07:34, 23 February 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.


 * Thank you! EMsmile (talk) 16:23, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Adjusting section headings
If someone has time, please adjust all the section headings as we don't need to repeat the title of the article ("water footprint") in all those section headings! Also I suggest we use more standard headings, such as "Background, History" etc. see e.g. here. EMsmile (talk) 16:23, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Europe Section
There is a section seems important because Europe is a continent that uses lots of water. However, there the EU does not include all countires in Europe. Additionally, although the US is not a continent is still uses a lot of water for their industries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Coycca Gonzales (talk • contribs) 17:04, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Water footprint by country
There should be a section with the countries that use more water and what are the industries of those countries where water is mostly used. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Coycca Gonzales (talk • contribs) 17:06, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Water footprints of products
Water footprint of products briefly mentions the variation in water usage by country/diet, but does not go into depth about the nuances related to each food product. Fawizzle (talk) 17:27, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 00:24, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
 * World Water Footprint.png

Change phrase "water balance"
Section "Calculation for different actors" writes: "The virtual water balance of an area is the net import of virtual water Vi, net, defined as the difference of the gross import Vi of virtual water from its gross export Ve." This "difference" parallels the idea of change in storage of water balance, and not water balance. Let us remember that change in storage is defined as the difference between inflow (import) and outflow (export).

So, using a very well-known hydrological law, i.e., water balance, in such a phrase is misleading and I think wrong. Additionally, the phrase is only used in that small paragraph, hence it can easily be changed. Any thoughts? Mitral8 (talk) 11:02, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: ENG 21011 Research Writing
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