A recipe for impact: key ingredients for companies to drive measurable impact in watershed health

Water is essential to life, yet 785 million people around the world lack access to it (Water.org 2021). Human overexploitation and mismanagement of water resources has resulted in a global crisis that is ranked as one of the top five global risks, in terms of its effect on society, by the World Economic Forum (WEF 2021). These water resource challenges are being exacerbated by climate change, further impacting the availability and quality of water in communities around the world. This global water crisis is not only impacting communities and ecosystems, it is also creating reputational, physical, and regulatory business risks and causing financial impacts across the private sector (CDP 2020). As a result, more and more companies are seeing the business value in engaging in corporate water stewardship. Corporate water stewardship helps companies understand, identify, and mitigate water-related business risks by recognizing the shared nature of water challenges and working with others to achieve more sustainable management of water resources. In response to this momentum, there has been an upwelling of guidance and frameworks aimed at helping companies manage risks and minimize negative impacts, and support corporate sustainability practitioners in their water stewardship efforts. Although there is now a variety of frameworks for corporate sustainability practitioners to consult and apply, the recent influx has also created some confusion, mostly on the part of busy practitioners who are struggling to navigate the abundance of guidance available and choose what guidance to use when. This confusion also has the potential to keep companies from focusing on what matters most: driving measurable improvements in watershed health, in priority high stress watersheds, ideally through collective action to achieve impact at scale.