Three Key Metrics

01

Water Use / Withdrawal / Consumption

This metric establishes the scale of a company's water footprint.

Water withdrawal, water consumption, and the broader term "water use" are not interchangeable. H2Oversight preserves the terminology used by each company and reports all relevant figures when more than one category is disclosed.

Corporate practice remains inconsistent. Some companies report total withdrawal, some report consumption, some provide both, and others use "water use" without clearly distinguishing the underlying water flow.

02

Water Intensity

This metric evaluates efficiency.

Water intensity compares water withdrawal, consumption, or use with a measure of business activity. Depending on the industry, the denominator may be units of production, metric tons of product, revenue, floor area, operating hours, hotel stays, megawatt-hours, barrels of energy output, or another operational measure.

• the numerator
• the denominator
• the water category being measured
• the organizational boundary
• the calculation methodology

H2Oversight preserves the intensity unit reported by the company rather than converting fundamentally different operational ratios into a single cross-industry ranking.

03

Water-Stressed Region Exposure

This metric provides geographic context.

The significance of withdrawing or consuming one cubic meter of water depends heavily on where that activity occurs. Local water availability, competing demand, ecosystem requirements, infrastructure, and water quality can make the same volume relatively insignificant in one basin and highly consequential in another.

H2Oversight generally prioritizes exposure classified as high or extremely high baseline water stress. When companies use recognized methodologies such as WRI Aqueduct or WWF Water Risk Filter, H2Oversight preserves the methodology disclosed by the company.

A facility count alone does not satisfy the Key Metric when no volumetric or proportional exposure is available.