11.2.1.2 Management of freshwater consumption

When it comes to the use of freshwater, however, the direct impact on the environment is not as easy to determine as was the case with the dumping of hazardous waste water. Nor is water usage by one company within a region easy to relate to certain changes to the environment. This is due to several regional and seasonal characteristics of water consumption and its impact on the environment, such as the source of water used for consumption, the level of consumption, and the general availability of natural freshwater, which greatly depends on a region's climate, the type of soil, the groundwater level, the density of the population, etc. Therefore, it would be extremely difficult to address corporate freshwater consumption and potential limitations on the use of freshwater in general legislation. Nonetheless, there are some examples of government action in protecting the environment by (temporarily) limiting corporate freshwater consumption. For instance, during the summer of2003 in the Netherlands, electricity plants were forced to temporarily halt their production, as groundwater was otherwise used for cooling down their production systems. Due to continuous high temperatures and no rainfall, groundwater levels had fallen low and water used by power plants would - when discharged to open surface waters - heat up the general water temperature (which was then already high) to a potentially dangerous level (UNEP, 2004). Likewise, the French government was forced to ration water use as a precautionary measure facing one of its severest droughts ever recorded after consecutive periods of high temperatures and no precipitation (Boselli, 2006). Generally, however, it will be difficult to attribute environmental changes in one watershed to the freshwater consumption of a specific enterprise.1