The goals and scope (Phase 1) of the water footprint assessment carried out here are a coarse resolution WFA for South
Africa as a whole, to identify priority products, hotspot regions, and related sustainability issues, and to provide recommendations on options to improve the current situation. In Phase 2, the accounting phase, the water footprint of production, the virtual water trade, and the water footprint of consumption are determined. We strive to provide a rather comprehensive evaluation by including various environmental and economic aspects in the sustainability assessment (Phase 3) presented here. Two aspects of environmental sustainability are considered. We compared – per catchment – the blue-water footprint to blue-water availability, i.e., the blue-water scarcity (Hoekstraet al., 2012) and the nitrogen- and phosphorus-related grey-water footprints to available assimilation capacity, i.e., the water pollution level (Liu et al., 2012).