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: up to five litres of water.

Quality matters as much as quantity. According to the World Bank, around 90% of the rivers in China near urban areas are seriously polluted. The overall cost of water scarcity—from pollution and the depletion of groundwater—is estimated to be 147 billion yuan ($21.4 billion) a year, or almost 1% of China’s annual output. In 2007 poor water-quality cost China some $12 billion in lost industrial output alone.

Elsewhere, Taipei City in Taiwan no longer allows companies to tap its groundwater, because of shortages. Firms in drought-ridden Australia have lived under stringent water restrictions for years. Southern Company, an electricity utility based in Atlanta, temporarily shut down some of its power plants last summer because of a drought. Indeed, according to a survey by the Marsh Centre for Risk Insights, 40% of Fortune 1000 companies said the impact of a water shortage on their business would be “severe” or “catastrophic”—but only 17% said they were prepared for such a crisis.

Not all companies are sitting still. Since 1995 Dow has reduced the amount of water it uses per tonne of output by over a third. Nestlé cut its water consumption by 29% between 1997 and 2006, even as it almost doubled the volume of food it produced. And at Coca-Cola bottling plants from Bogotá to Beijing, schools of fish swim in water tanks filled with treated wastewater, testament to the firm’s commitment to clean all its wastewater by 2010 (it is 84% of the way there).

Cynics say such programmes are mere public relations. There is some truth to this. Companies that use freshwater in areas where it is scarce are understandably unpopular. Activists have attacked both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, for instance, for allegedly depleting groundwater in India to make bottled drinks. Coca-Cola took the matter to court and was exonerated by an independent commission, which blamed a regional drought for water shortages, but activists were not mollified. Coca-Cola has responded by redoubling its attention to water—for instance, by backing a scheme in Kaladera to teach villagers how to harvest rainwater and irrigate crops more efficiently. “Regulatory licences to water are not enough,” says Jeff Seabright of Coca-Cola. “We need a social licence—the OK from the community—to operate.”