You've heard of carbon footprints - now a new way of working out your water footprint has been developed.

The first Global Water Footprint Standard aims to help water saving measures around the world and marks an important step towards solving the world’s water problems.

The Water Footprint Assessment Manual: Setting the Global Standard shows us how as individuals, companies and nations we can see how much we're contributing to issues over water use and environmental problems around the world.

On an individual level, our water footprint can be understood in terms of how much water we use through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the goods we buy.

We can control our water footprints, making them more sustainable, by using less water intensive products and choosing to buy goods from water sustainable markets.

This could prove to be difficult of course - we understand how shopping for local produce can help our carbon footprint, but information regarding water use can be harder to come by.

We must start to demand product transparency from businesses and regulations from our government. And if that sounds like a big task, just think for a moment what we collectively knew about carbon footprints 20 years ago.

Ruth Mathews, executive director of the Water Footprint Network, said: "The water footprint of common products such as coffee can be surprising, for example it can take an average of 140 litres of water to produce each cup of coffee.

"But more importantly, the Global Water Footprint Standard helps us all know more about how much water we use, where it comes from and how we each can take steps to make our water footprint sustainable, to ensure that the world’s people and natural ecosystems will have the freshwater necessary to thrive well into the future."

And on that note, I’m off for a cup of tea (35 litres).

[Image: Milosz1]