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Water has increasingly become an international concern, as shocks such as droughts and floods in one country can have international repercussions. Such dependency and potential disruption will increase with growing population and resource requirements and is predicted to be further exacerbated by climate change (Vörösmarty et al. 2000). These shocks will cause more indirect impacts upon the natural services and capital lost through disturbance to ecosystems. This could result in a potential chain-reaction of events across globalized systems of trade, driving increased vulnerability for those dependent on affected services. As the true value of ecosystem services has only recently been recognised it may yet be a long time before they are properly accounted for in more sustainable management decisions and incorporated into international trade within ecosystem services. Various accounting tools and methodologies have been proposed that can assist our understanding of how to value water in an international trading environment, such as the Water Footprint concept (Hoekstra and Chapagain 2006; Hoekstra and Mekonnen 2012), which is essentially a conceptual way to communicate water use. While this approach provides a useful tool with which to raise awareness of how water is utilized and traded at the international level it should not provide any indication of how water footprints affect water supply or requirements of ecosystems (EEA 2010a). Freshwater and the ecosystem services it provides are therefore an international concern, for agricultural and energy sectors as well as domestic consumption, and this global dimension and nexus of issues surrounding water vulnerability will increasingly need to be considered in any policy trade-offs.
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The water footprint should be used with care as indicator. Referring to an earlier statement of R. Vannevel, the water footprint does not reflect an environmental impact and just represents volumes of water use, not related to the water availability or abstractions of water systems.
Therefore one sentence of the papagraph should be rephrased as follows:
While this approach provides a useful tool with which to raise awareness of how water is utilized and traded at the international level it does not provide any indication of how water footprints affect water supply or requirements of ecosystems.
accepted and verb changed