The role of corporate water stewardship in creating a water secure future 

Water stewardship represents an opportunity for the corporate world to look after its business interests while safeguarding the environment

Water is high on the agenda at climate conferences these days. But while domestic and international are certainly crucial when it comes to setting expectations and building frameworks around water use, lumbering bureaucracy makes for a slow pace of change, and the world just can’t wait.

Which is where the private sector comes in, with corporations’ greater nimbleness enabling them – if so inclined – to reduce their water footprints in response to global climate challenges. But are they inclined? And if so, what are they doing about it?

A thirsty world

Every industry relies on water – it’s vital in processes from cleaning to cooling, dying to diluting. Some sectors are thirstier than others, however, with agriculture and food and beverage production coming out on top. Agriculture alone accounts for 69 per cent of freshwater withdrawal globally on average, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), while all but three of the 17 food and beverage processing activities listed on the CDP’s Water Impact Index rank as having either a critical or very high impact on freshwater resources.

The good news, says Alex Adam, head of water stewardship at the Rivers Trust, is that “a growing number of businesses and corporates are beginning to realise water related risks/opportunities”. That said, he goes on, “people are at different phases within that”. While some corporates are merely concerned with meeting their regulatory requirements around water use, the leaders of the pack are pursuing sophisticated water stewardship strategies that recognise its potential to help them tick a whole lot of environmental, social and governance (ESG) boxes.

Adam explains: “The challenge is, you talk about carbon, biodiversity, plastic, water, each of these things in individual silos, whereas actually, if you start to look at that through water being the currency of natural capital, your water stewardship strategy should address issues around water, carbon and biodiversity.”

Not to mention that responsible water stewardship makes good business sense. “The food system is quite broken,” says Benjamin Thomas, senior environment manager at the John Lewis Partnership (JLP). “As a sector, we acknowledge that it needs big thinking and rapid response. But there is always going to be an underlying current that if we want to continue to be in business, having the quality of products that we want, we need sustainable supply chains, and water is a really good example of that.”

Key to JLP’s water stewardship ambitions is WRAP’s Courtauld Commitment 2030, a voluntary agreement enabling collaborative action across the UK food chain. As of October 2023, 60 UK food and drink businesses have signed up to the Water Roadmap, which aims to deliver on the Courtauld Commitment’s target that 50 per cent of the UK’s fresh food is sourced from areas with sustainable water management.

“It's been a really useful mechanism for us to deliver action at any kind of scale in our supply chain,” says Thomas, citing the collective action projects that WRAP is currently undertaking or due to begin in the UK, South Africa, Kenya and southern Spain. These projects engage with farmers, put in place farm management plans and have replenished billions of litres of water to communities and nature.

Creating new wetlands to improve water quality in Morpeth, Northumberland © Northumberland Rivers Trust

He goes on: “If we were to tackle the water-related issues in our supply chain as an individual business, we would struggle to get a great deal of traction. It requires a huge amount of coordinated resources and stakeholder involvement at a catchment level to ensure any impact is material. The Courtauld Commitment is cost effective, scalable, and has the potential to drive real change.”

Beyond Courtauld

WRAP’s Water Roadmap is just one of several influential voluntary frameworks available to organisations seeking guidance when it comes to water stewardship. The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) currently certifies 291 sites around the world with its AWS Standard, while 367 companies (across food and beverage production and beyond) endorse the UN’s CEO Water Mandate on water stewardship. Its publicly available, practical guide to Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA), now in its second iteration, exists to help companies offset – or ‘replenish’ – their water use within a local catchment.

The best way to do that, says Adam, is through projects that see multiple stakeholders (a retailer, a water company and a local authority, for example) coming together to co-fund large-scale nature-based solutions (NBS) that are managed and implemented by local wildlife and river trusts. As with WRAP’s collective action projects, this could mean interventions such as wetland creation, peat restoration, hedge planting and building woody dams. He acknowledges, however, that “this is the more of an art than a science at the moment, because there's lots of nascent markets and we don't have everything in place”.

The barriers to implementing NBS as a tool for water replenishment at scale are threefold, according to Adam: difficulties translating between the corporate ‘languages’ of stakeholders; a lack of compromise; and an unwillingness or commercial inability to share data. The latter is the biggie: “We don't share who's interested in which blobs where, so we, as a society, are investing staggeringly large amounts of time and effort trying to work out who's interested in this and who's interested in that, and then piecing all those bits of the jigsaw together. We have to find a smart way about being more comfortable sharing that information.”

The hidden middle

This is a challenge for organisations across sectors and at every rung on the ladder, with specifics varying according to context. In the food system, wholesalers are typically harder to engage with water stewardship because they occupy the “hidden middle” between agriculture and retail, explains Kelly Shields, technical director at the Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC), a trade body for the UK’s fresh produce industry.

“When you are facing into retail supply chains, you get an awful lot of information, and a whole load of help. But when you are that wholesaler, it might not be as easily available to you,” says Shields.

“We can lead the charge on the retail sector side but actually, when you look at how much is sourced from non-retail supply chains as well, what are the sustainability requirements of that?”

As a signatory of the Courtauld Commitment, the FPC aims to illuminate water stewardship opportunities for businesses in the hidden middle. “We are not an environmental specialist but we can connect our members with organisations that may be able to assist them in that respect,” says Shields.

The AWS is another membership body with an eye on ensuring that smaller players aren’t left behind in the pursuit of sustainable water use. Its newly updated

certification requirements enable groups of sites – including those associated with different companies – to seek certification.

“While industrial sites may opt for AWS certification as a single site, smaller players (such as farms or several small factories within an industrial park) may benefit from group certification,” explains CEO Adrian Sym.

“With a central control system, several sites may receive an assessment that could result in a certificate for all sites. This has the potential to reduce audit time and certification costs. We are committed to ensuring the accessibility of AWS certification and are always looking for ways to reduce potential barriers.

Accountability and disclosure

Environmental performance reporting is another area with room for improvement, particularly for small enterprises. Corporate disclosure of environmental risks and impacts at the request of investors is key to driving better performance and ultimately shifting financial flows to support a more sustainable economy. Frameworks such as CDP (a global charity that in 2023 helped over 23,200 organisations measure and manage climate, water and deforestation risks) are encouraging large businesses to drive greater accountability and disclosure in their supply chains. But getting good quality data can be challenging in sectors with large, complex supply chains.

One project seeking to make data more easily transferable and comprehensible is Seebeyond, which was commissioned by the Environment Agency (EA) to develop standardised environmental metrics for the food and drink sector. The idea being that, by reducing the burden of sharing information on environmental performance, businesses in the food system should have more capacity to go beyond legal compliance and achieve more ambitious environmental goals.

Seebeyond’s metrics – including on water consumption and quality – are currently being tested with a range of retailers and manufacturers in the food and drink industry via a prototype digital platform, and future phases of the project will include developing technology to automate data exchange between food companies and external systems. Ultimately the plan is to roll out the learning to other sectors too, though the focus is on the food system for now.

When it comes to the particular challenges the water industry faces around data sharing and collaboration, Adam points to the EA’s water industry national environment programme (WINEP) methodology, which recommends that water companies should aim to achieve 20 per cent co-funding for WINEP projects.

“That isn't just, ‘let's share the burden in terms of funding’,” he explains. “It was a mechanism to try and get everyone out of their respective silos, water companies in particular, to engage with these other players in this space.”

Catchment clarity

For Dr Geoff Townsend, an industry fellow with Nalco Water, if we want to smooth the way for collective action on water stewardship, what’s required is greater clarity on water supply and demand at the catchment level. With this in mind, Townsend is currently working with government bodies, industry and NGOs on establishing a so-called ‘single source of truth’ that brings together information from monitoring within catchments, satellites and industry.

“We have the necessary data today, but it's scattered through many different databases,” he explains. “Instead of debating which of many competing data sources should be used for making decisions, anyone in any way can use the same, unified source of data. It moves the conversation from ‘what’ to ‘how’.”

Townsend hopes that this data source will be available within the next nine months to a year: “I feel very optimistic. There are no bits of the jigsaw puzzle missing.”

Completing this puzzle will not by itself solve the very complex challenge of how to sustainably manage global freshwater resources in an age of climate crisis. Nor will voluntary frameworks like the Courtauld Commitment, the AWS Standard, Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting and CDP. But taken together, by making it easier for corporates to do the right thing and work with governments, water companies and NGOs on water stewardship, these measures have the potential to build a more water secure future for both us and for nature.

“It's not all about risk management and doom and gloom,” stresses Townsend. “When water's available sustainably, it enables operations to operate profitably and be more competitive, and their cost of production go down, they make better products.

“Water is a massive growth enabler, and an enabler of all that flows from growth in terms of secure jobs and social cohesion.”

Author: Jo Caird, The Environment editor

This article first appeared in the Winter 2024 print issue of The Environment. To gain access to the entire digital archive, and receive your hard copy of the magazine each quarter, become a CIWEM member.