In recent years, some have suggested that we are entering a “post-water stewardship” era; that water stewardship has not achieved what it promised. Have we reached a point where we need to give up on this paradigm? Is water stewardship dead?
No.
However, water stewardship does need a bit of a re-boot. In 2013, WWF released its inaugural Water Stewardship Brief — a document that outlined not only our vision of water stewardship, but a roadmap for the future. Back then, the Brief was designed to ‘articulate why WWF had chosen to engage in water stewardship, to be transparent about what we intended to do and to be clear about what we expected of others’.
The 2013 brief was well received by governments, companies, and investors, but the landscape has evolved. Furthermore, while a risk-focused narrative has proven effective in mobilizing companies along the water stewardship journey, fear may not be the best way to motivate. We need to shift to a more positive, optimistic, value-creation based narrative.
Five years on since the first Brief, we are excited to release a new and updated 2018 Brief. This new publication is targeted at companies who have already begun their water stewardship journey — including many of WWF’s corporate partners. It reviews where the water stewardship community has come from, what we, as WWF, have learned, and where we all collectively need to head next.
The intention of the updated Brief is to inspire and enable urgent and collective action through forging a new narrative — from risk to value creation — which seeks to mobilize the majority. Another complementary Brief, which will launch later in the year, will target those companies new to water stewardship.
The new narrative that we are encouraging is tied to five elements:
These elements, which are detailed in the publication, are borne out of the elements we believe will enable leading companies to help transform basins through scaling our collective impact.
WWF, in an effort to walk the talk, will also be engaged in each of these aspects in the coming months and years ahead, whether it is the next briefing note to help build capacity; deploying bankable basin solutions; coordinating with peer organizations through AWS or the CEO Water Mandate; building out contextual, context/science-based water target work & support tools such as the updated Water Risk Filter; and publishing more work on water governance.
Water stewardship is not dead. In fact, we might argue it’s never been more alive. The challenge now, is how we scale up. And to do that, we need everyone to do more: to create more value through water stewardship as a shared purpose.
