Water Stewardship

Today, approximately 1.1 billion people around the world do not have access to safe drinking water. By 2025, an estimated one-third of the world's population will face severe and chronic water shortages. Human activities often contaminate the world's limited freshwater resources, threatening the health of lakes, rivers, and wetland ecosystems. Water is the main ingredient in all of our beverages and is essential to our manufacturing processes. Water also has broad impacts for our supply chain, as a key component in the production of sugar, for example. Reducing water scarcity and enhancing water quality for our operations and communities we serve are direct and vital business concerns. The world has a finite amount of water but, if managed properly, there is enough to meet our personal, agricultural, and industrial needs, as well as those of nature.

The Coca-Cola Company's water stewardship strategy incorporates four core focus areas:

1. Plant Performance 2. Watershed Protection 3. Community Water Initiatives 4. Global Awareness and Action

On June 5, 2007 at WWF's annual meeting in Beijing, China, our Chairman and CEO, E. Neville Isdell, announced our goal to return to communities and to nature an amount of water equivalent to what we use in all of our beverages and their production. This means reducing the amount of water used to produce our beverages, recycling water used for manufacturing processes so it can be returned safely to the environment, and replenishing water in communities and nature through locally relevant projects.

This aspirational goal will be a multi-year journey for our entire system, but it is a journey we have begun and will continue to pursue. Together with our bottlers, we hope to establish a water-sustainable business on a global scale.

Our strategy is built on a comprehensive risk analysis of water resources in the Coca-Cola system -- an analysis that provides a clear understanding of our water risks on a global and local scale, enables business units to define and prioritize ways to reduce water risks, and allows us to track progress in water stewardship.

For more information on our 2007 data and 6-year trends, please review our 2007/2008 Sustainability Review.

Learn more about our water stewardship goal »

Learn about production of DASANI® purified water in North America, go there »