Por Redaccion 
The Benidorm City Council will soon begin the bidding process for the technical assistance contract to develop the Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan in the municipal area. This contract is part of Action Number 2 ‘Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan for Benidorm’, within the Tourist Sustainability Plan in Destinations ‘Benidorm Vision 360’, which in turn is included in the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan, funded by the European Union-Next GenerationEU. The study will allow for understanding the water demands of the different local economic sectors to make decisions that improve effectiveness and efficiency in management.
The budget for the Comprehensive Water Footprint Management Plan amounts to 465,000 euros, of which 65,000 are allocated to the technical assistance contract currently being tendered, and the rest for the implementation of the plan.
The action line aims to develop a web platform for calculating the territorial water footprint in the municipality following the principles, requirements, and guidelines of ISO 14046 for assessing the water footprint (WF). «This study aims to calculate the water demands of the various sectors within the municipal territory and will include individual analysis of municipal water use, water use in agriculture and municipal irrigation, the industrial sector, and finally, the impact of tourism on water management,» explained José Ramón González de Zárate, Water Cycle Councillor.
The calculation of the water footprint will allow understanding «the total amount of freshwater used to produce goods and services consumed in Benidorm,» including both water directly consumed by the population and water used in the production of food, industrial products, and other services such as tourism. «This will enable proposing measures to achieve sustainable resource management and establish strategies to improve water use efficiency,» he added.
The contract winner must provide technical assistance services for water footprint calculation from this year and develop a web platform for managing Benidorm’s territorial water footprint. This implies carrying out and auditing the water footprint calculation, taking into account all activities related to the water cycle.
As mentioned, the calculation will be carried out following the guidelines of ISO 14046, obtaining blue, green, and grey WF. The blue water footprint refers to the consumption of surface and groundwater resources along a product’s supply chain. The green water footprint relates to the consumption of rainwater resources that are not converted into runoff but are incorporated into crops or other green areas, returning to the atmosphere through plant evapotranspiration. The grey footprint is defined as the volume of freshwater required to assimilate the pollutant load given natural background concentrations and environmental quality standards. It refers to water that becomes contaminated as a result of production processes.
The benefits of implementing the ISO standard for calculating the water footprint are several, as detailed by the councillor, who cited «the assessment of potential environmental impacts related to water, identification of opportunities to reduce potential environmental impacts related to water, facilitating strategic water-related risk management, improving water efficiency and optimizing its management, providing information for sustainability decision-making to industry, administrations, and NGOs, and providing consistent, reliable, and evidence-based information to report water footprint results.»
With the results in hand, the contract winner will carry out a sensitization campaign presenting the water footprint results for the first year and providing an explanatory presentation of measures to reduce the territorial water footprint.
Finally, a web platform for water footprint management will also be developed, where the main results can be consulted, such as the calculation of direct and indirect water footprint, the overall and individualized calculation for each economic sector, the type of footprint calculation (blue, green, or grey), a map showing land use (water demand) by economic sector, and a historical evolution of the water footprint since the first year of calculation.
Example: The Benidorm City Council carries out the certification and recognition of the destination’s sustainability through actions of the Tourist Sustainability Plan in Destinations, within the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan – funded by the European Union-NextGenerationEU, included in the Territorial Sustainability Plan of the Valencian Community and coordinated by Turisme Comunitat Valenciana, with a cost of XXX euros.