Water sustainability overview

  • 3 minutes

Water sustainability in Microsoft Sustainability Manager enables organizations to meet water sustainability disclosures and regulatory water quality reporting.

For organizations, meeting the regulations about water usage, accessibility, and quality is important. Such regulations include:

  • Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

  • Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)

  • Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Questionnaires

  • Mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure rules about water impact as required by government authorities and securities boards

In addition, the growing pressure from customers and stakeholders is compelling for organizations to improve water sustainability practices. This means using water efficiently, recycling wastewater, replenishing water sources near physical sites, and ensuring that wastewater is returned to local water ecosystems in ways that are nonpolluting and compliant with water discharge regulations. The pinnacle achievement of water sustainability is becoming water positive---that is, replenishing more freshwater in the ecosystem than is consumed.

Microsoft's water sustainability journey

In 2020, Microsoft announced its commitment to become water positive by 2030 and joined the Water Resilience Coalition. Getting to water positive goes beyond reducing water-use intensity and replenishing water sources. It's also about providing people across the globe with access to water and sanitation services, engaging in public policy and driving innovation. For more information on Microsoft's journey, see The journey to water positive.

Key water scenarios

Microsoft Sustainability Manager enables organizations in their water sustainability journey. The following key scenarios help organizations to achieve their sustainability goals for water:

  • Sustainable water accounting at sites and the organization

    • Configure and link site-boundaries and water sources with measurement data.

    • Visualize, analyze and report water inflows, storage and outflows at a site-level tagged with water risk.

    • Manage water sustainability goals and water revenue intensity KPI.

  • Good water quality at individual sites

    • Wastewater discharge compliance and effluent aware data model and functionalities.

    • Visualize and report wastewater effluent compliance with regional discharge regulations.