Interview by Sumbul Mashhadi  

A plain cotton t-shirt takes about 2,720 liters of water to make and most of that water is not used in the factory where the shirt is sewn. It is used in the fields where cotton grows thousands of miles away. Dr. Ashok Chapagain is the lead researcher who worked that number out. He is part of the Positive Water Impact (PWI) research team at the Pacific Institute, where he also leads the Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF). He is also working on another flagship project called Resilient Value Chain (RVC), which sets out to give companies a practical way to act on exactly the problem he spent his early career measuring. 

Sumbul: Twenty years ago you were behind the research that calculated how much water goes into a cotton t-shirt. What has it been like to watch that idea travel from paper to something companies now ask you to help them act on? 

Ashok: Let me start three decades back. I spent most of my career counting water that nobody could see, the water behind a cotton t-shirt, a cup of coffee, and a kilo of rice. In the early years, around 2000 to 2006, when Arjen Hoekstra and our team introduced the term water footprint, it was a way to make invisible water visible and help decision makers make conscious choices. It was a scientific way to unravel the supply chains of the goods and services we consume and reveal the water hidden inside them. Today, water footprint research is a mature field of science. 

It has been a satisfying journey to see that people understood there is a number, and that it is not only a number, but also a striking number. The cup of coffee I have right now takes about 140 liters of water to make. People say, wow, that much water in that cup of coffee. But then they go back home, business as usual, nothing happens, because there is no way to act on it. Those questions were left hanging all the time. The water was someone else’s problem, in someone else’s country. 

What has changed is that the risk is coming home now. Dry rivers, failed harvests, suppliers who cannot deliver. So the question I am being asked is not whether the number is real, but what do I do about it. That is the question I always wanted, and it is harder and more interesting than the measuring ever was. Companies now want to understand their water footprint, the local context and risks behind it, take resilience actions, and achieve a positive water impact in the basins where it matters. That, in a sentence, is what the Resilient Value Chain project is about: turning research-based outcomes and frameworks into action in the basins where the water is actually used. 

Sumbul: The Water Resilience Assessment Framework asks organizations to think about resilience rather than risk, and Positive Water Impact asks a company to put more back into a basin than it takes out. What do companies most often underestimate in getting from a target on a page to something a basin and its communities can feel? 

Ashok: Companies are doing their best, and rightfully so. What they underestimate is that a basin is not just a place. A basin is a complex system. It has an institutional component, a socioeconomic component, and is not only biophysical. You might stay within the biophysical boundaries, but there are social and institutional boundaries too, and all three together make the complete water system in a basin. Fixing a target against one component often leads to unintended consequences, or even negative impacts, if it is not properly designed. 

A corporate target is often a single global number. A basin is local, shared with farmers and towns and ecosystems, and it responds very slowly. You cannot offset water the way you can offset carbon. Water has a dimension in time and in place, and that is what makes balancing it very hard. In WRAF, you are building the capacity of the whole system to cope with shocks, not hitting one single number, and PWI gives companies the approach to make those basins resilient. 

Combining the three, water accounting where I started, Positive Water Impact, and the system resilience as the pathway, is the Resilient Value Chain. It gives companies an approach that is both scientific and practical for making meaningful interventions. Very few companies have done all of that yet. There are companies doing water accounting and companies doing PWI, so they are doing the pieces, but they are not connecting them across the supply chain. That connection is what is missing, and it is why we are starting this project. 

Sumbul: In the sourcing basins this project is concerned with, who are the people living with the consequences now, and if this project works, what will be different for them in five years? 

Ashok: That brings us back to the root of the problem. If you answer from the top down, you can make it look successful, but unless the local people who are the real caretakers of the water system are looked after, your whole system can collapse in the face of climate change. 

In most basins where companies source their raw materials, those people are often smallholder farmers. Even the big buyers and brands are reliant on smallholder farmers. Often, these farmers are the women who manage water for both the household and the field. They are the ones living with the wells that run dry, the ones having problems getting drinking water and proper sanitation. And if the rains no longer arrive in time and the rivers run dry, the factories cannot depend on those locations either, and everyone is impacted. 

The core of this project is not about making the factories water positive, it is about  creating a positive water impact in the basin. If it works, then in five years those farmers are partners in the basin rather than  just names in a supply chain, and the company sees the catchment it depends on as something to invest in, not just to draw from. The basin is then in better shape to take the next drought, flood or other shocks and stresses. The real test is not a number in a report, it is whether the basin and the people who rely on it are more resilient. 

There is a governance side too.  In some countries, such as such as the United Kingdom where I currently reside, the legislative framework is quite mature while in many sourcing regions the institutions are still developing. . Where governance is weaker there is a risk of failure, so you cannot become more resilient unless you strengthen those institutions too. 

Bonus question: You run marathons, and a marathon is one of the few places where a person’s relationship with water becomes completely immediate. Does running change how you think about the water you spend your working life counting? 

Ashok: It does more than I expected. When I go out for a short run I am already well prepared. I can drink water at home and do not need to worry about it, just like having water in your house when there are no shocks or stresses. But when you go out for a long run, water stops being a number. It becomes something you need, something you feel. Take too little and your body tells you within an hour that you are under stress. It is a small, honest version of what a basin lives with: there is only so much, timing matters, and you pay later for getting it wrong. If my hydration strategy is not right, then no matter how hard I have trained, how costly my carbon-plated running shoes are, how much gel and energy drink I carry, it does not matter. I am going to hit the wall and fail. So I spend my working life counting liters of water and my weekends rationing how much I can drink, and I have more appreciation of the water available.

It is a limited resource. We need to consume wisely, and let us not run dry. 

Looking back, I have spent almost thirty years showing people where the water goes. What matters now is what we do with that knowledge, and doing it with the people who live in these basins, not to them. If the Resilient Value Chain work leaves a few basins healthier and more resilient and a few communities more secure, that is a better legacy than any number I have calculated. 

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