Ensuring that we reduce our water footprint
Water is a scarce resource, especially in the region in which we operate. As such, we recognise the importance of managing our water use in a sustainable manner and minimise our water footprint as much as possible.
To accomplish our 2020 target of reducing water consumption by 15%, we encourage our people to adopt better conservation practices. We have performed several awareness campaigns around water conservation such as the distribution of signages in our common areas to emphasise the importance that we place on adopting responsible water consumption.
We constantly monitor our water consumption rates which allows us to better manage our resource use. Our data management software also allows us to monetise the resources that we use, which helps us to communicate the impact of our resource use in monetary terms. Despite of efforts to reduce our water consumption, we saw an increase in the amount of utility water consumption in 2019.
Each quarter, we generate dashboards from our software that include our utility water and drinking water consumption at the Group level and hold regular meetings to discuss and adjust our approach towards our resource consumption, by revisiting our established baseline conditions, setting targets and by comparing our performance to these conditions.
In 2019, we have embarked on another major project to assess the feasibility water filters in 2 of our premises. We have conducted water tasting tests in these two pilot sites and this project will be rolled out in other locations in UAE. The objective of this initiative is to consume water that has not come into contact with contaminants of plastic bottles as well as reduce our overall consumption of plastics. Furthermore, we are expecting a financial return on investment after 3 years allowing us to incur cost savings over the long run. We plan to install the filtered systems in the beginning of 2020 and roll it out across other offices and countries. This initiative is in line with the new regulation set out for 2020 in the Dubai Food Code which requires all the hospitality sector to offer filtered water to customers.
