The Software Water Handbook is a companion resource to the Software Water Intensity (SWI) specification. Where SWI defines what to measure and how to calculate software water impact, the Handbook addresses the harder practical question: where do you actually get the data, which sources should you trust, and where do they fall short?

It organises water impact data into four layers — direct operational water, indirect (electricity generation) water, embodied water, and scarcity-weighted impact — providing a structured reference for practitioners implementing the SWI specification.

The most mature work so far covers direct operational water, with schema-conformant data extractions and worked examples drawn from sustainability reports published by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services. The Handbook documents not only what each provider reports, but also what is missing and why — surface-level findings that are already proving valuable for the community.

How does it complement the SWI specification?

The SWI specification and the Software Water Handbook are designed to work together. The specification provides the measurement framework; the Handbook provides the data foundation. As the SWI specification matures towards ISO submission, the Handbook will evolve alongside it, ensuring practitioners have a reliable, community-maintained reference for sourcing and validating the inputs required to calculate software water intensity.

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