Industrial Collaborations for a Secure Water Future: Leadership and Action

Water is no longer just an operational input-it is a strategic business imperative. As global demand rises and climate change intensifies water stress in regions worldwide, corporations are realizing that securing water resources is essential for long-term business continuity. From operational efficiency to supply chain resilience, businesses are adopting comprehensive water strategies and partnering with governments, NGOs, and even competitors to address shared water challenges. This shift from compliance-focused approaches to proactive water leadership is reshaping how industries manage one of the planet’s most critical resources.

Why corporate water management matters
Building effective water strategies
The practice of water stewardship
Engaging diverse stakeholders
Understanding the water-food-energy nexus
The power of water advocacy
Advocating for better water governance
Collective action at scale
Moving from “doing no harm” to driving scalable solutions
The path forward for industrial water leadership

Why corporate water management matters

Most companies now recognize that water will significantly affect business growth and profitability in the near future. For many organizations, water already drives key decisions, particularly regarding facility locations. Shareholders and investors are increasingly scrutinizing how companies address water issues, and water is now widely recognized as a material business risk.

The business case is clear. Companies that fail to manage water risks may face operational disruptions, supply chain failures, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage. Some organizations have already experienced the consequences, including losing their operating licenses due to unsustainable practices or stalling operations due to water shortages. On the other hand, companies with strong water stewardship programs are better equipped to sustain operations well into the future.

Building effective water strategies

An effective corporate water strategy goes beyond simply reducing consumption within factory walls. Leading companies are developing holistic approaches that address water efficiency, quality, risk management, and community engagement across their entire value chains.

Amazon’s water strategy demonstrates this comprehensive approach through three key pillars: reduce, reuse, and replenish. The company employs water-conserving measures in buildings, uses cloud-based IoT technology to analyze real-time water usage and identify leaks, sources water from sustainable alternatives like recycled water and harvested rainwater, and invests in watershed restoration projects that improve water access for communities.

Experts recommend that companies begin with a comprehensive water risk assessment that examines both basin-level and operational risks. This involves analyzing metrics from tools such as the WWF Water Risk Filter and WRI’s Aqueduct platform to understand how challenges like water scarcity, quality degradation, and governance gaps affect operations. Once risks are identified, companies should set site-level targets and aggregate them into company-wide water stewardship strategies.

The practice of water stewardship

Water stewardship moves beyond internal efficiency measures to embrace collaborative watershed management. This approach encourages businesses to use water in a socially equitable, environmentally sustainable, and economically beneficial manner through stakeholder-inclusive processes involving both site-level and catchment-based actions.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard serves as the globally recognized framework for credible water stewardship. This auditable framework guides organizations through a five-step process: gather and understand water challenges and risks, commit and plan through developing a water stewardship plan, implement improvements at site and catchment levels, evaluate performance against plans, and communicate efforts for transparency and accountability.

Engaging diverse stakeholders

Effective water stewardship requires collaboration with diverse stakeholders-including competitors. WWF emphasizes that awareness is only the first step of the water stewardship ladder. Companies must take internal actions while also supporting local watershed conservation and engaging in collective efforts toward better basin governance. The organization’s Water Risk Filter is now used by over 2,000 companies to map more than 50,000 sites across supply chains.

The Water Resilience Coalition, launched by seven global companies including AB InBev, Diageo, Microsoft, and Ecolab, exemplifies this collaborative approach. Coalition members commit to achieving net positive water impact by 2050 through joint investment in infrastructure, innovation, policy advocacy, and supply chain engagement. By working collectively in water-stressed basins, these companies are tackling challenges that no single organization could address alone.

Understanding the water-food-energy nexus

Smart water stewardship also requires understanding the complex interconnections between water, food, and energy systems. Agriculture currently consumes nearly 70% of global freshwater, while energy production and clean energy infrastructure compete with farming for land and water resources. By 2050, global food demand is expected to increase by over 50% and water demand by 20-30%.

This nexus demands cross-sectoral thinking where actions in one area are evaluated for their impacts on others. Identifying synergies and trade-offs-such as using treated wastewater for agricultural purposes or installing floating solar panels on reservoirs-creates multiple economic, social, and environmental benefits across sectors.

The power of water advocacy

Beyond operational improvements and watershed collaboration, corporate leaders are increasingly becoming vocal champions for water sustainability at local, national, and global levels.

The CEO Water Mandate, established in 2007 by the UN Secretary General and UN Global Compact in partnership with the Pacific Institute, has mobilized over 240 companies to commit to continuous progress across six core elements: direct operations, supply chain and watershed management, collective action, public policy, community engagement, and transparency.

Advocating for better water governance

Responsible corporate engagement in water policy must be motivated by a genuine interest in advancing efficient, equitable, and ecologically sustainable water management. This includes working within well-regulated environments, promoting inclusive partnerships across diverse interests, and ensuring that private-sector actions align with public policy objectives.

Companies can engage at multiple levels. Internally, they ensure operations and suppliers comply with broader water policy objectives. Locally, they engage with authorities and communities to promote inclusive decision-making. Globally, they partner with governments, development agencies, and NGOs on international advocacy and research toward best practices in water management.

Collective action at scale

The Water Resilience Coalition has expanded to 40 member companies with a combined market capitalization exceeding $5 trillion. By 2030, the Coalition aims to build water resilience in operations and supply chains while investing in collective action to improve conditions in 100 priority basins worldwide-the most water-stressed basins on the planet.

Ecolab, a founding member and co-chair of the Water Resilience Coalition, is also co-founder of the California Water Resilience Initiative. This collaboration harnesses public-private sector innovation to address California’s water challenges, demonstrating how companies can lead systemic change through advocacy and partnership.

Moving from “doing no harm” to driving scalable solutions

The evolution in corporate water management represents a fundamental shift from minimizing negative impacts to proactively delivering positive outcomes. WWF describes businesses as uniquely positioned to champion innovative solutions to freshwater challenges, emerging as visionaries that secure water for profit, people, and planet.

Water stewardship enables organizations to protect business continuity while ensuring supply chains remain resilient to climate-related impacts. Companies embracing this approach shift their focus beyond their own sites to the wider water context, taking a long-term view that benefits ecosystems and communities alongside operational performance.

DuPont articulates this vision: a future where all people have daily access to safe, clean drinking water, where industry has the necessary water for production, and where the circular nature of water is optimized sustainably and efficiently. Achieving this requires continued collaboration across sectors and borders to accelerate progress on shared water challenges.

The path forward for industrial water leadership

The tools, frameworks, and collaborative platforms now exist for any company to begin or advance its water stewardship journey. Organizations like WRI provide risk assessment tools, help set contextual water targets, and support companies in developing water stewardship strategies. The AWS Standard offers a globally applicable framework for understanding water use and working collaboratively toward sustainable management.

Success requires integrating water considerations into core business strategy and investment decisions. It demands engaging stakeholders across watersheds-including competitors-to address shared challenges. And it calls for corporate voices to advocate for improved water governance at all levels. The companies leading this transformation are not only managing risk but also driving the systemic changes needed for water security.

What do you think? How might businesses in your industry collaborate with competitors and communities to address shared water challenges? What role should corporate advocacy play in shaping water policy at local and global levels?

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PDF 📄

Industrial Collaborations for a Secure Water Future: Leadership and Action

Table of Contents

Why corporate water management matters 🔗

Building effective water strategies 🔗

The practice of water stewardship 🔗

Engaging diverse stakeholders 🔗

Understanding the water-food-energy nexus 🔗

The power of water advocacy 🔗

Advocating for better water governance 🔗

Collective action at scale 🔗

Moving from “doing no harm” to driving scalable solutions 🔗

The path forward for industrial water leadership 🔗