What is a water credit?
Just like carbon credits, a water credit, under the UWR protocol, represents a quantifiable amount of unutilized water conserved, harvested, saved or recharged-typically in terms of one cubic meter or 1000 liters of groundwater equivalent prevented or avoided from being extracted.
Original Published on Jul 29, 2022
The UCR’s new and path breaking water credits initiative is now well known, however, a key overlooked design feature is that the UCR has designed the RoU eligibility criteria to reward sustainable groundwater and water conservation development, with rules that are standardized and facilitates the issuance of the water credits to forgotten traditional practices of water conservation that are deep rooted in the science of ancient India.
In India, every region has its own traditional water harvesting techniques that reflect the geographical peculiarities and cultural uniqueness of the regions. The basic concept underlying all these techniques is that rainwater should be harvested whenever and wherever it falls, and so it follows that there can be no start date or commissioning date cutoff for water projects, (unlike the voluntary carbon offset UCR CoU program).
We would recommend the following feature (link) to understand the diversity that India can showcase in terms of water recharge and water conservation to the virtual water and NetZero water market.
Water credits can be used to generate funds for scaling up rural water harvesting efforts by monetizing past efforts (vintage years 2014–2023) to create future climate resilience without the need to appeal for donations or recourse to crowd funding platforms. This can be achieved without the need to setup a water cap and trade market, i.e. by using blockchain/DLTs for token creation with oracle pricing to create an environmental asset that works as a utility and store of value.
