To address water supply shortage, one of the water issues, the Sumitomo Electric Group has been promoting activities to reduce water consumption since fiscal 2008. In fiscal 2018, we set a target of reducing water consumption (with fiscal 2017 as the base year) and have since been working to reduce water consumption per unit of sales by 1% per year (5% reduction for the fiscal 2022 target). In the course of the reduction activities, we identify water leakage in our facilities and address it while also working to reduce water withdrawal through such initiatives as the reuse of effluent that used to be discharged.

We have evaluated water risks indicated by 13 indicators in total, including water quantity, water quality, regulations according to local laws and relations with neighboring communities, on a five-point scale by using Aqueduct*, which is a tool to evaluate such risks in Japan and overseas production bases. As in fiscal 2021, we focused on floods and droughts in fiscal 2022 and identified priority sites with high risks and significant challenges. This evaluation method calculates a risk point (RP) on floods and droughts for each site based on the evaluation of four risk items, which are river flooding, coastal flooding, water depletion and dry weather, on a five-point scale first and then evaluates the sites based on “the probability of occurrence of water risks” (the RP mentioned above) and “the magnitude of the impact when a risk occurs” (on sales or water consumption) as the two axes to recognize the sites in the red zones of the matrix as those with important issues. As a result, we have identified four sites with important issues on floods and one site with important issues on droughts.

*Aqueduct: A tool developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) to evaluate water risks in various parts of the world. Water risks to the bases located on a world atlas are　quantitatively evaluated on a five-point scale.