During the last week of August, Stockholm hosted World Water Week, where leading experts and decision-makers came to exchange ideas, experiences, encourage innovative thinking and solution building to address urgent, global water challenges such as this year’s topic “Water and waste: Reduce and Reuse”. This year’s theme, illustrated the importance of water in the circular economy and highlighted solutions society can take to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Examples of circular water management were demonstrated in the eight deep-dive case studies designed by the WBCSD to help companies implement water reuse through the Business Guide to Circular Water Management. These conversations helped reiterate the importance of implementing water stewardship strategies beyond companies’ fences and highlighted the benefits of engaging with other stakeholders at basin level. Many participants came back to the fact that water can also significantly mitigate climate risks and contribute solutions to climate adaptation.

There was also a slight, but noticeable growing interest from investors. At several sessions, investors were present and involved in a number of the discussions, most noticeably at the OECD roundtable for financing water. They brought an important perspective to the conversation on how to bridge the investment gap and is evidence of how the investment community is starting to respond to the growing importance of water and the varying interests. Furthermore, their presence also pointed to the fact that investors as a group have different interests, a commercial investor, for example, may not have the same objectives and drivers as an institutional investor. Read more.

Water stewardship

Several sessions and side-meetings were dedicated to water stewardship frameworks. As in years past, companies, as well as other organisation, are increasingly eager to demonstrate their awareness and involvement in water stewardship and demonstrates a growing need for scaling up action. This was particularly evident in the discussions that took place during the week’s events around the topic of context-based targets for water stewardship initiatives based on the work by CEO Water Mandate and Embedding Project. Making these targets relevant to the wider catchment, rather than just to company’s internal needs and measurements, is critical to ensuring truly sustainable water management.

The discussion about how water stewards can and should develop meaningful targets is based on the need to scale up action to the river basin level. World Water Week saw a number of fruitful discussions around how to address the challenges related to setting context-based water targets such as: dealing with a lack of data, the most appropriate indicators for monitoring targets, the inevitable trade-offs between environmental, social and economic objectives and how to align these targets with public sector objectives.

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