Risky Water Business
Image: New York Times
At 895 ft of water depth, Lake Mead by Hoover Dam becomes a ‘deadpool’ where water will not flow downstream as part of a hydropower system. Hydropower generation becomes at risk at the 1,206 ft level. 40 million people rely on the Colorado River, and it’s drying up fast. About 10 percent of the river’s recent total flow evaporated as it bakes in the sun due to global warming. Approximately 150 ft of water level at Lake Mead (from about 1,225 ft to 1,068 ft depth) has been depleted since 2000. China’s Three Gorges Dam has 34 turbines and aggregate capacity of 22.5GW, but it displaced 1.5M people; 40M people have been displaced globally due to hydro plants. All that investment is now in jeopardy due to lowering water levels. Drought is crushing ranchers. Some parts of the America gets too little water, while some are getting too much. Climate change is having a dramatic impact on water: from natural disaster damage to depleting supply to disruptions in commerce.
Source: South Pole Consultancy
$425B in business value is estimated to be at risk by 2030 due to water security; this is an estimate by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit that runs a widely adopted global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impacts. The CDP provides a framework to assess and disclose carbon emissions in three main segments:
Scope 1: direct emissions from owned or controlled sources
Scope 2: indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed
Scope 3: all other indirect emissions that occur in a company's value chain
Professional services companies like South Pole Consultancy are helping business with answering the CDP questionnaire and implementing their climate ambition. The most impact seems to be around sourcing from suppliers and capital spending on future projects.
Source: South Pole Consultancy
Source: Watershed
Companies like Watershed provide software solutions to address for corporate carbon reduction programs. Implementation of automated decision making to realize carbon neutral outcomes seems many years in the future. Perhaps Enterprise Carbon Management software will be a category with its own Gartner Magic Quadrant sooner than later.