Participants are encouraged to become water neutral through a three-step process (known as R3) of:
1. Review
Participants are required to undertake a detailed water audit to accurately measure their operational water usage. The results of this audit, known as the company’s ‘water deficit’, need to be publicly available to promote transparency and open dialogue.
2. Reduce
In partnership with WWF South Africa, corporations are required to develop and implement an ambitious, but realistic, time-bound water reduction and efficiency strategy.
3. Replenish
Corporations are then required to invest in projects that will make available ‘new’ water into freshwater ecosystems, equal to their ‘water deficit’ (i.e. the net outcome of Steps 1 and 2). While we believe that there may be numerous projects that could quantitatively deliver ‘new’ clean water, as a start, we have concentrated our efforts on the quantification of water made available through the removal of invasive alien plants. The large amount of data available on the topic through the current and historic experiences of the Working for Water Programme made this an obvious first choice. To facilitate the calculation of how investments need to be made for a given corporation to become Water Neutral, we have developed a Water Neutral Calculator.
