Triple Bottom Line Reporting of Sustainable Water Utility Performance

There are a number of emerging and/or critical issues driving adoption of TBL accounting principles and sustainability in urban water. They include urban growth and the requirement for infrastructure expansion with high capital costs; increased stress on existing water supply availability and quality; aging and failing infrastructure and high costs involved in asset management; potential climate change impacts on water availability; and customer demands and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and carbon trading.


The goals of this project were to (1) define a process to refine and tailor triple bottom line (TBL) reporting approaches for U.S. water utilities, (2) help U.S. water utilities understand why TBL reporting is beneficial as well as identify some of the challenges with moving toward TBL reporting, and (3) summarize available tools for reporting and sustainability assessment, barriers encountered, and lessons learned.



TBL offers a tool to help utilities with many current and emerging issues they are facing, from finding solutions to their aging workforce in a competitive market to global warming. To produce reportable TBL performance, there is a clear need to have developed environmental, social, and economic elements of many internal processes common to utilities. These include strategic and asset management plans, service levels, performance indicators, and targets.



Stakeholder involvement and use of sustainability assessment tools is also important, as is the use of formal management systems. TBL reporting and planning are interlinked and good planning will progress with improved reporting. There is a lack of public TBL information in U.S. utilities when compared with other U.S. sectors (e.g., electricity), as well as with the water industry globally. Therefore, there is a need for a number of implementation measures by individual utilities and the industry as a whole. Among these, training and development of improved performance indicators (e.g., QualServe) stand out as particularly important.