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Including water risk; water management; water stewardship; integrated water resources management; water governance; rights related to water; important water-related areas; and water access for community, cultural, and navigation purposes.
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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 (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.
This free online training module from the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) can help you better understand water stewardship and the AWS Standard. The module has three sections, wherein it introduces the concept of water stewardship, explains the AWS standard, and explains how to implement it. The resource will be most useful to sustainability practitioners interested in implementing the AWS standard or simply updating their water stewardship knowledge.
This guide, created in collaboration with WWF and AstraZeneca, can help you to advance credible water action by addressing material impacts on water across your full value chain. The guide identifies potential pathways for cooperation with suppliers, and groups them into five categories: operational enhancements, financial activation, advocacy engagement, industry alignment, and procurement incentivisation. Each pathway includes specific actions to engage suppliers and explains their potential benefits. This practical resource will be most useful to supply chain management and sustainability professionals.
The report from the OECD was created to support governments and stakeholders in addressing challenges and pressures from megatrends on water demand and supply through more effective governance and institutions. It features two tools to strengthen water policies: the OECD Water Governance Indicator Framework, which is a voluntary self-assessment tool, and 50+ practices that illustrate the OECD Principles on Water Governance. The self-assessment tool was created to support multi-stakeholder dialogue on the performance of water governance systems, and will be particularly beneficial to corporations. It takes a contextual, place-based approach that will help you to measure, assess, and take action on water-related goals.
This research paper from the Stockholm International Water Institute can help you better understand water governance and how to improve it. Although it is an academic paper, the paper outlines a practical framework for unpacking water governance. The authors describe eight core governance functions and their application to different water issues. It then defines a set of good governance attributes and outcomes.
Although parts of this framework are intended for the public sector, it remains broadly applicable to sustainability practitioners involved in water stewardship in the private sector.
The water planetary boundary within the Planetary Boundaries Framework attempts to provide a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications, but it has been challenging to translate and apply it to the regional and local scales at which water problems and management typically occur. This report introduces a cross-scale approach that accounts for fair share and local safe operating space to guide sustainable water management within varying contexts.
This self-assessment tool is based on the OECD report Implementing the OECD Principles on Water Governance, and was created to support the implementation of the Principles. The Framework is composed of a 'traffic light' system of 36 water governance indicators (input and process) and a checklist containing 100+ questions on water governance. It is complemented by an action plan for discussion on future improvements of the water governance system in the short, medium, and long term.
This framework from the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) can help you understand how water stewardships applies to the extractives sector. It features a maturity model that outlines five key elements of water stewardship: governance and strategy, risks and opportunities, business planning integration, measurement, and reporting. Within each element there is a set of practices grouped into three levels of maturity (basic, advanced, and leading), enabling you to assess your maturity and identify opportunities to improve. The framework is also aligned with external guidance such as the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
This short resource from WWF can help you to understand the societal benefits of restoring rivers and wetlands. It explains why healthy rivers and wetlands are important, as well as the benefits that restored freshwater ecosystems provide. It also lays out the freshwater challenge in UN conventions and commitments and explains how policy makers can accelerate river and wetland restoration.