Corporate water accountability – the role of water labels given non-fungible extractions
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the potential for the labelling of the water footprint of products in an Australian context. It considers theoretical contribution and technical challenges of water labelling and in particular how non-fungible water extractions might be evaluated and communicated.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines the theoretical contribution of labels drawing on the sustainability typology articulated by Hopwood et al. and more recent claims that access to product-level environmental information may constitute a consumer right. The paper also explores labelling empirically via an extensive literature review and ten interviews with water regulators and commercial water users.
Findings
Water footprint reporting could make a significant contribution to public water literacy. Significant technical hurdles remain, however, in appropriately distinguishing differing impacts of water extractions as well as in relation to measurement, allocation and information overload. This suggests that labelling of complex products is currently infeasible but existing and emerging solutions to these issues suggest that labelling of simpler products is a realistic possibility.
Research limitations/implications
Given the relatively small scope of interviews, the findings of this study might be triangulated with other research methods such as surveys and/or focus groups for the findings to be validated. Additionally, future research might focus on overcoming each of the challenges noted above for a particular product in order to bring water labelling closer to practical reality.
Originality/value
Labelling schemes offer improved corporate supply-chain accountability yet have received little attention in the social and environmental accounting literature to date. This paper therefore seeks to make a theoretical and empirical contribution to this emerging field of labelling in the area of water, a key sustainability issue.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Ken Cussen and Gordon Boyce. The author would also like to acknowledge helpful comments by Matthew Egan, participants at the 7th Australasian Conference on Social and Environmental Accounting Research the 2012 RMIT Accounting for Sustainability Conference and two anonymous reviewers. Any errors and omissions are of course the author's own.
Citation
Hazelton, J. (2014), "Corporate water accountability – the role of water labels given non-fungible extractions", Pacific Accounting Review, Vol. 26 No. 1/2, pp. 8-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/PAR-07-2013-0074
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited