The bigger threat to a growing global population might not be food shortages but water scarcity. As more people in China and elsewhere take greater advantage of inventions of the Industrial and Computer Ages, the need for water acquisition grows.

A Financial Times series “A World Without Water,” begins today, in FT fashion, by examining how the lack of H2O affects corporations. While you would expect Coke to be apoplectic about potential shortfalls, technology companies are likewise concerned (or should be). An excerpt from Pilita Clark’s piece:

“Google, for example, declines to say how much it spent on a plant it has built at one of its data centres in the US state of Georgia, which enables it to use diverted sewer water to keep its servers cool. Nor has it disclosed how much it spends at a Belgian data centre that uses water from an industrial canal.

Joe Kava, the company’s head of data centre operations, has warned that water is ‘the big elephant in the room’ for tech companies, which can typically use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. ‘We’ve been focusing on power consumption and energy efficiency and that’s excellent,’ he said in 2009. ‘I think the next thing we need to turn our attention to is what do we do about the looming water crisis?’ As water becomes more scarce, data companies’ use of it could attract public scrutiny, he added, possibly resulting in regulations governing how much water they consume.

Google told the FT last week that its focus on water conservation means it now has a facility in Finland cooled entirely by seawater. It is also looking at using captured rainwater in South Carolina.

Regulation is a growing concern for many companies, which is a reason investors are starting to press for more disclosure about water risks.”