Water scarcity and water quality degradation are global challenges affecting human health, economic stability, and the environment. Traditional approaches, often focused solely on on-site water efficiency or local regulatory compliance, are insufficient for addressing the scale of this problem. A new framework is required to manage the interconnected risks of water availability and pollution across entire regions. This holistic approach is known as water stewardship, which seeks to move beyond isolated actions toward collective, sustainable water management.
Defining Water Stewardship
Water stewardship is a commitment to managing water resources in a way that is environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, and economically beneficial for all users within a shared watershed. It is distinct from simple water conservation or efficiency, which focuses exclusively on reducing water use within a single facility. Stewardship recognizes that water is a shared resource and that one user’s actions have implications for others, including communities and ecosystems, across an entire river basin.
Water challenges are inherently local, with risks like scarcity or poor quality varying dramatically between different watersheds. Effective stewardship requires comprehensive action that considers the entire catchment context, not just a company’s “fence-line” operations. This approach is achieved through a multi-stakeholder process involving both site- and catchment-based actions, ensuring decisions are context-specific and collaborative.
Core Pillars of Effective Stewardship
Effective water stewardship is built upon a framework of fundamental outcomes that guide action beyond mere regulatory compliance. These outcomes are often referred to as the core pillars of stewardship:
- Achieving a sustainable water balance, ensuring that ongoing water use does not result in long-term negative impacts on the natural environment or other users within the catchment.
- Maintaining or improving good water quality status, ensuring that discharged water is clean enough to sustain native flora, fauna, and the needs of downstream users.
- Implementing good water governance, requiring transparency, accountability, and the promotion of stakeholder participation in water-related decision-making.
- Protecting important water-related areas, including high-conservation value habitats and areas that provide water-related ecosystem services.
The Role of Stakeholders in Stewardship
Water stewardship is a collective endeavor, requiring coordinated action from diverse groups to address shared water challenges.
Businesses and industry move beyond internal efficiency to actively engage in the watershed where they operate. They leverage resources to mitigate water risks in their supply chains and invest in landscape-scale solutions like wetland creation or watershed restoration. This action secures their long-term operations and contributes to the water security of the local community.
Governments and regulators establish the necessary policy frameworks and legal structures that enable effective stewardship. Their role involves defining sustainable limits for water use and discharge, enforcing compliance, and facilitating governance mechanisms required for equitable water sharing.
Civil society, including local communities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), provides crucial local knowledge and acts as an oversight mechanism. These groups ensure that stewardship efforts are socially equitable, protecting access to safe water and sanitation for all community members.
Measuring and Reporting Stewardship
Accountability and transparency require organizations to verify and disclose their performance and impact. Measuring stewardship involves tracking progress against goals using specific metrics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), that extend beyond simple water consumption. These KPIs often include the volume of water withdrawn and discharged, water use intensity per unit of production, and the percentage of water recycled or reused on-site.
To standardize reporting, global frameworks provide a verifiable system for measuring and assuring water performance. The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Standard is a globally applicable framework that allows major water users to assess their impact and work collaboratively for sustainable management. The AWS Standard operates on a five-step process—Gather and Understand, Commit and Plan, Implement, Evaluate, and Communicate and Disclose—which allows sites to seek third-party certification to demonstrate the credibility of their stewardship claims.