This target is being coordinated by the Alliance for Water Stewardship. This Alliance is building a water stewardship program aiming to complement existing tools and measures, for instance those focusing on accounting and disclosure, and which can be used by both private and public sectors to achieve their water stewardship objectives. One core element of the Alliance’s program is the development of a standard and certification system for water stewardship, which has particular relevance for private sector enterprises.

With some 90 per cent of the world’s water use coming from business, leaders who undertake efforts to achieve sustainability via water stewardship have the potential to achieve massive change. To this extent, standards and certification have emerged in recent years as a powerful mechanism for change. For example, last year alone saw Mars pledge to have all its cocoa certified by 2020, Twinings pledged to have all its tea certified by 2015 and Unilever promised to source 100 per cent of its agricultural materials sustainably by 2020. The ISEAL Alliance’s ISEAL 100 publication highlights how large global companies such as Nestle, Walmart and the Home Depot, are increasingly turning to credible, voluntary, social and environmental standard systems to ensure assurance of responsible business practices throughout their supply chains.

Furthermore, the world’s business leaders are increasingly becoming aware of water risks. Reports from WWF (Assessing Water Risk – DEG/WWF), and the growing prominence of water (for example, within the World Economic Forum) as it intersects with food security, climate change and energy all highlight the need to urgently develop water solutions. The business community has responded by generating tools, such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Water Tool, as well as reporting initiatives, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, or the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Water Disclosure work. This latter effort, combined with those of Ceres, also serve to highlight the extent to which the institituional investment community is taking interest in water and the material risks it poses to businesses’ bottom lines. In response, groups such as the UN Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate have emerged and developed guidance materials to assist with responsible water stewardship (e.g., public policy engagement). Furthermore, as awareness has grown, efforts to improve measures have also increased, leading to the emergence of things such as water footprinting has emerged through efforts of the Water Footprint Network (WFN), and more recently, the emerging International Standards Organization (ISO)’s 14046 Standard on a life cycle approach to Water Footprinting.

When combined, these footprinting tools, disclosure frameworks, and stewardship response efforts result in the input materials to develop a robust water stewardship program. Such a program with a standard and verification program is then capable of providing the assurance mechanism that has proven successful for other issues, such as forest management. The standard can provide a mechanism to reduce facility and cumulative watershed impacts, and in turn provide economic, social and environmental benefits to both the company and other stakeholders within the watershed.

The effort that the Alliance for Water Stewardship is undertaking in fact seeks to identify various solutions in this space, and through doing so, inform the development of a standard that can reduce water-related impacts and deliver upon certification requirements.

AWS_Priority3 2_target6_Draft workplan_20110802