Generación de un contexto para la aplicación del concepto de huella hídrica gris en Colombia

Abstract

Water is the central axis of various anthropic activities, and therefore the development of communities. Due to the misuse and management that is given to the resource, it is necessary to address indicators that allow to account for the impact on its quality. The water footprint is a multidimensional indicator that allows estimating the water involved in a process, product, activity, among others. It has three components blue, green and gray water footprint, the first considers the fresh water immersed in the production chain of a good or service, the green water footprint takes into account the water of precipitation that allows to maintain the vegetation in times of drought and that is not part of the runoff and finally, the gray water footprint estimates the volume of water necessary to assimilate a pollutant load in a body of water, in such a way that it complies with the environmental regulations avoiding impacts on the environment or human health . The internship was developed at the Instituto de Hidrología Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales-IDEAM, where the possibility of implementing the concept and of developing it in the National Water Study was addressed; however, it was possible to show quite a few limitations in the calculation of the indicator, especially due to the natural concentration and lack of information on specific discharges in bodies of water.