by Tien Shiao, Hannah Baleta, and Sonali Abraham

 

The CEO Water Mandate and the Pacific Institute held a webinar on August 18, 2020, titled “Lessons from India and South Africa: Setting Site Water Targets to Drive Action.” Over 100 participants from around the world attended. Webinar panelists engaged in an interactive session with high-caliber questions from the moderator and a responsive audience. The questions centered primarily around how to 1) start target setting, with a focus on stakeholder engagement 2) create a target and 3) drive action once a target has been identified.

To facilitate knowledge-sharing among stakeholders interested in this subject, and for those who might have missed the webinar, the project team has created a brand-new FAQ page in which we summarize key audience questions and takeaways. Going forward, this FAQ page will include insights from the various contextual target-setting projects around the world and will be regularly updated to reflect new findings and project learnings.  

Highlighted questions answered on the FAQ page include:

• How did you select stakeholders to validate findings?
• How did you ensure participation of the most relevant stakeholders?
• How do you create shared ownership of achieving targets with stakeholders?
• With water challenges being interconnected and with a strong desire for collective work among the private sector, what is the role of government in this work—regulatory, fiscal, other?
• What are examples of collective action and targets? What has worked and what has not? What makes a target realistic?
• How do you convert targets into an actionable plan for the company?

Click on the FAQ page to explore the answers to these questions provided by the project team.

Thank you to all the participants and the panelists who attended and participated in the webinar. We hope that this FAQ page will facilitate collaboration and spur engagement with a wide audience. We look forward to regularly updating this page as these projects grow.

For information on the overall guidance and case studies from Noyyal-Bhavani River Basin, India, Upper Vaal River Basin and Berg and Breede River Basins, South Africa, and Santa Ana Watershed in California, please refer to Setting Site Water Targets. Please contact ceowatermandate@unglobalcompact.org if you are interested in setting contextual water targets or for further information.

Tien, Hannah, and Sonali are researchers at the Pacific Institute, which implements the CEO Water Mandate in partnership with the UN Global Compact. The CEO Water Mandate mobilizes business leaders to advance water stewardship, sanitation, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals