Water’s Role in a Sustainable Reset

Part 2: Thoughts from the Kitchen Table

The conversations around corporate sustainability often touch on very large goals, like reducing carbon footprints and carbon emissions—goals that require systemic change and the transformation of entire industries. Those are very necessary goals in the broader effort to reverse climate change around the world, and something that businesses everywhere should work toward.

That being said, there is a goal that is just as impactful and arguably more actionable that we can resolve to tackle today: creating a more sustainable water system.

Water plays a central role in corporate—and worldwide—sustainability. According to the UN, more than 2 billion people are living with the risk of reduced access to freshwater resources, and by 2050, at least one in four people are likely to live in a country affected by chronic or recurring shortages of freshwater. And when you think about the global economic landscape, you’d be hard pressed to find an industry not reliant on a stable water supply, whether it is used to power that enterprise, required to feed its supply chain or is instrumental in the creation of a product itself.

Unlike the fight against climate change, preserving water as a natural resource is a specific and actionable goal that does not require entire industries to disappear or the societal turmoil of reinventing most of our economy—and it has potential to create tremendous gains. There are water issues facing industries and communities now, and the UN numbers predict that the problem will continue to grow over time. In many cases, the technology already exists to help ease water system stress, and we’re seeing places like Singapore and Southern California utilize existing technology today to add resiliency into their water system through water reuse.  

Many companies have put sustainability goals in place to deliver on their corporate responsibilities to their community, their stakeholders and their customers. Over the last ten years, sustainability and water have evolved from a brief discussion around water availability as part of a capital investment project to having full-fledged public water reduction goals at the world’s top companies. A great example is Intel committing to becoming net water positive by 2030. Today, world leaders across dozens of industries are prioritizing efficient usage. Many are also putting in place technologies and protocols for recycling and reusing water to lessen the company’s impact on the local community, both in terms of the resources the company uses and the discharge it releases back into the watershed.

Solving water issues and ensuring that future generations have the resources they need to continue the economic and industrial progress is a global issue with solutions that start locally.

Do you think water should be a priority in planning a sustainability reset? And which companies do you see as leading the way in establishing and activating a holistic water strategy?