The “Baseline eco-efficiency assessment” Phase will provide the basis against which innovative practices and technologies will be compared in terms of their contribution in enhancing the overall eco-efficiency of the service systems. Economic and environmental assessments will be made for a Business-As-Usual scenario, which will describe expected evolutions and developments for a mid-term time horizon (5 to 10 years).

The economic assessment will quantify:

• Financial costs incurred in the individual stages of the pertinent value chain,
• The economic value generated as a result of water use in the sectors that will constitute the focus of each Case Study

The environmental assessment will include:

• The collection of data to compile a preliminary inventory, describing the relevant input and output flows (e.g. raw water, consumed – evaporative – water, recovered water, chemicals, electricity, fuel, land use, non-evaporative water use, etc.) for each stage of the analysed systems.
• The assessment of indicators associated with environmental impacts and resource usage for each impact category, including those for pollution loads discharged into water, air and land, as well as use of resources (renewable, mineral or fossil) in each stage of the value chain.

These primary indicators, relating to each impact category, will be combined with the outcomes from the economic assessment, to provide a first set of baseline eco-efficiency indicators. The derived set will describe the total value of products and services produced as a result of water use vs. individual environmental impacts.

Subsequently, composite indices will be developed, to enable comparison and benchmarking. This will include the aggregation of the different environmental indicators across the entire service system, and the normalization and weighting of the aggregated indicators.

Back to the Case Study Development Phases