Water Management and Stewardship

Water Management and Stewardship: A Getting Started Guide

The growing global water crisis presents a risk to businesses and the communities and environments where they operate. Collectively, we face intertwined challenges of water scarcity, extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, declining water quality, and significant losses of water-related ecosystems. Effective corporate water management and stewardship approaches can help to foster resilience. Anchored in research, this guide helps your company to understand how water management and stewardship support a credible water strategy by providing a foundational understanding of the concepts and clarity on the work ahead.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship Standard

The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard can help you to understand your water use and impacts, and to work collaboratively and transparently for sustainable water management within a catchment context. The standard has five steps: 1) gather & understand, 2) commit & plan, 3) implement, 4) evaluate, and 5) communicate & disclose. The AWS also provides a certification process.

The latest iteration of the standard, version 3.0, has been revised to improve practicality, utility, and value. This includes clearer minimum requirements; enhanced streamlining for cost-effective implementation at scale; better alignment with broader sustainability agendas, such as climate-related goals; and stronger integration with corporate-level reporting, such as tighter alignment with the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

In addition to the Standard, the AWS has produced comprehensive guidance to support persons responsible for implementing the Standard within their organization.