Beyond the Watershed: The Next Frontier for Corporate Water Stewardship
Water stewardship in the realm of corporate conservation has come a long way — from typical corporate responsibility outreach and a focus on internal efficiency gains to a new focus outside the four walls of facilities, to the watersheds in which companies operate.
This trajectory has made sense: efficiency gains get harder to capture as you pick the low-hanging fruit, and it can also cost a lot less to go outside your four walls and do restoration projects for habitat and environment flows, especially if you can partner and leverage funding from the public sector or other companies. Even more important: the big wins and opportunities are likely outside the factory’s four walls, especially for corporations in the food, beverage and clothing sector that are heavily dependent on agriculture. That’s why we’re seeing corporations (led by companies such as Coca-Cola and Intel and Miller-Coors) now entering basin-wide coalitions (such as the California Water Action Collaborative) to partner on beyond-four-walls stewardship.
But what’s the next galactic frontier for corporate water stewardship? Beyond the watershed.
‘Why do we have to worry about problems outside the supply of a key ingredient — water — to our production facilities?’ The answer: your supply chain is almost certainly global, and so are your customers.
— John Sabo
The first reaction from the private sector (especially shareholders) will probably be a simple “Why? Why do we have to worry about problems outside the supply of a key ingredient — water — to our production facilities?”
The answer: your supply chain is almost certainly global, and so are your customers. Companies downstream of their supply chain want to protect the flow of key ingredients from the increasing frequency and intensity of floods and droughts that climate change is bringing to many parts of the world. They will also want to do this in places where their customers live, not just where their key ingredients are sourced. Moving beyond the watershed is a bottom-line argument, driven by your customer base and by your need to secure expensive supply chain ingredients.
One avatar of this work is Coca-Cola. The sweetener that goes into many Coke products requires water. The sustainability of sweetener requires looking at places like the U.S. corn belt, and water security for that part of Coca-Cola’s supply chain means looking at products that may not benefit a certain facility but that are focused on supply chain efficiency.
Thinking about sustainability beyond the watershed has many challenges — not least of which is integrating across the food/energy/water nexus within any given company. Each of those silos might have its own leader, agenda and metrics for sustainability. Research in academic circles is thinking through how this integration happens, but that research isn’t penetrating well enough into the corporate space. Climate change, however, is going to accelerate the need for these alliances and this learning.
I talk about all this at length in my new online microlearning lecture — check out the course if you want to go deeper.
For more information about ASU Future H2O’s work and research on creating opportunities for global water abundance, visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter.
