Writing a water chapter that is not a rainfall chart

Water chapters go wrong in two opposite ways. One is a page of rainfall from a national atlas that never mentions the hotel’s basement meter. The other is a single cubic-metre total with no source, no destination, and no dry month.

Georgia’s reporters usually need something smaller and more stubborn: where the water came from this year, who measured it, and what happened when the municipal supply thinned.

Withdrawals before stewardship

Name the sources: municipal connection, well, tanker, river intake for a cellar process. Give cubic metres for the year and, if you have them, for the peak month. A winery in Kakheti that irrigates in a dry vintage should say so. A Tbilisi hotel that only uses the city network should not borrow a “basin risk” paragraph written for a Spanish agricultural group.

Meters, estimates, and the sentence the owner dislikes

If two houses in a group have meters and two do not, the chapter should not pretend they all have meters. Print the estimates as estimates. Owners dislike that sentence. It is also the sentence that gets meters funded the following year — we have watched this happen.

Discharge and sewage

Few of our clients treat process water. They pay a utility. That is still a fact: volume if billed, or “sewage not separately metered” if it is not. Inventing a discharge quality table from a brochure is worse than a short honest paragraph.

What we leave out

We leave out stock photographs of droplets. We leave out global water-stress indices that do not name a Georgian municipality. We leave in the week the hilltop hotel tanker-filled the cistern, because that is the year.

If you are commissioning a report and water is on the buyer’s list, bring the bills, not a sustainability slide. The chapter will be shorter and harder to argue with.