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CEO Water Mandate – Pacific Institute

Stakeholder Engagement Guide For Nature-Based Solutions

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This guide takes a pragmatic approach to stakeholder engagement by presenting general principles and best practices that should be considered throughout all stages of an NBS project, as well as outlining specific steps for incorporating stakeholder engagement throughout NBS project stages. The identified principles and best practices include engaging a diverse range of stakeholders; building long-term relationships and trust; communicating with empathy; prioritizing transparency and accountability; co-creating rather than imposing; recognizing mutual benefits; removing barriers to engagement; formalizing relationships; ensuring adequate financial support; and appointing well-trained, knowledgeable facilitators.

Water Resilience Assessment Framework

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Climate change is driving many types of water challenges, including water scarcity and abundance, worsening water quality, and shifts in timing of the hydrologic cycle. Shocks and stresses affect the resilience of water systems and the stakeholders that rely on them. Specific guidance on how to understand system resilience and measure systematic changes and intervening actions can ensure a more resilient future for all.

This report presents a framework to facilitate a shared understanding of water system resilience and allow practitioners to develop common measurable goals and outcomes for stakeholder and resilience planning. The Water Resilience Assessment Framework consists of four key steps: visualizing the system; developing a resilience strategy; testing the resilience strategy; and evaluating.

The report was created in partnership with the CEO Water Mandate, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), and World Resources Institute (WRI). The Pacific Institute implements the CEO Water Mandate in partnership with the UN Global Compact.

August 20, 2021August 20, 2021

Building Resilience Faster at World Water Week 2021

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By Jason Morrison

As the co-secretariat of the UN Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate, the Pacific Institute is pleased to be a leading contributor at the upcoming World Water Week. Through the CEO Water Mandate, the Pacific Institute is mobilizing business leaders to support water resilience at global scale—through increased implementation of nature-based solutions, collective action, and other strategies. As the Head of the CEO Water Mandate and the President of the Pacific Institute, I extend a direct invitation to join us at World Water Week.

From international reports and research findings, and even from our own experience in day-to-day life, it is evident that we are far from reaching our shared global water goals. On some water issues, we even need to quadruple our pace, if we are to meet our ambitions under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. These worsening conditions also make it evident that there is an urgent need for accelerated action. Businesses, through collective action with other sectors, are positioned at an extraordinary juncture, where environmental, economic, and community water resilience can be attained by acting decisively. But we must act boldly and swiftly!

During this year’s World Water Week, the CEO Water Mandate will offer the private, social, and public sectors tools and frameworks to support such decisive action and to accelerate water stewardship and resilience efforts through 11 events.

As a key collaborating partner for SIWI’s World Water Week, the CEO Water Mandate, in collaboration with IKEA and WBCSD, presents The Private Sector–Water and Climate Resilience in Uncertain Times Seminar. This event will convene business leaders with diverse stakeholders to consider leadership positions, advances in science and practice, and robust solutions to build resilience to our wicked climate change problem. Running from August 23rd to 26th, the seminar’s sessions will focus on corporate leadership, collective action, and tools and approaches to accelerate the achievement of our shared water stewardship goals.

We will also launch several innovative tools during the Week. On Tuesday, August 24th we will present the Water Resilience Assessment Framework, an innovative methodology to assess water system resilience to create shared understanding and collective action. We will also launch the Water Action Hub 4.0 later that day. The Hub offers companies additional tools to assess and improve their water stewardship and understand the links between water stewardship and climate resilience. On Wednesday, August 25th we will share a preview of a state-of-the-art tool to account for co-benefits of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). This work supports the business case for NBS investments and allows companies to make informed decisions regarding water security, climate resilience (including greenhouse gas emissions reduction), biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development.

We will also be celebrating the road we have travelled and beginning new journeys. On Wednesday, August 25th we are happy to share five years of lessons learned through our WASH4Work initiative in a session that will feature the business case for WASH, best practices in operations, supply chains and communities, and will launch a discussion about the future-looking agenda of Climate Resilient WASH. Finally, we will also introduce, in collaboration with GIZ and AWS, the new formation of the Water Stewardship Acceleration (WaSA) Forum. We seek to share how the Forum can facilitate the high-level exchange on bottlenecks, best policy practices, and increasing the visibility of the water stewardship approach on the political agenda through this session on Wednesday, August 25th.

In addition, the CEO Water Mandate is a partner for World Water Week’s Leadership in Business Accelerator, a new feature for this year’s conference which will highlight levers that can speed up and intensify our impact within the private sector. We will close the week with a private session part of the SIWI’s Accelerator which will bring our CEO Water Mandate members and partners together to discuss accelerating achievement of water security and resilience through the concept of net-positive water impact. This session will help build a common approach that empowers companies in their journey to achieve a positive impact on water in alignment with the UN Global Compact’s SDG 6 Ambition.

Find out more about how to access and apply our collective action platforms, business cases, innovative resilience metrics and novel tools that put nature at the center of solutions in our World Water Week dedicated site. Join our 11 seminars and sessions and discover with us new ways to build resilience faster.

Setting Enterprise Water Targets: A Guide for Companies

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The complexity of global water challenges requires meaningful action across sectors, including the business sector. A critical aspect of business engagement in successful water stewardship is setting water targets that address the shared water challenges in the water basins where a company operates, sources, and provides goods and services, and that enable actions that reduce or eliminate the associated water risks.

This guide provides steps, for the first time, on setting corporate enterprise-level water targets. Each step can be met through a series of actions to ensure that the water targets drive value across any section of a company’s value chain.

The guide was produced by the CEO Water Mandate, in collaboration with the World Resources Institute, the Pacific Institute, CDP, The Nature Conservancy, and WWF. The Pacific Institute is co-secretariat of the CEO Water Mandate, a UN Global Compact initiative that mobilizes business leaders on water, sanitation, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds: Guide

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Nature-based solutions use or mimic natural processes to meet societal and environmental needs. They can be used to restore, manage, or protect water resources while also increasing biodiversity and providing additional social and economic benefits.

Yet there is no standardized method to identify, estimate, and monitor the benefits that nature-based solutions can provide, making it hard to build the case for investments in these solutions. This guide builds on the Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds Landscape Assessment [hyperlink], which highlights the barriers for businesses to implement nature-based solutions on a large scale. The guide outlines which specific nature-based solutions can be implemented in various habitats, and suggests methods for measuring the benefits.

The guide was developed by the CEO Water Mandate, the Pacific Institute, The Nature Conservancy, Danone, and LimnoTech.

In this Series

Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds Landscape Assessment

Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Business Framework for Water and COVID-19: Rebuilding and Resilience

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The business community has a key role to play in responding to COVID-19, rebuilding the economy, and preventing and mitigating future shock events — both broadly speaking and specifically regarding water and handwashing. This second in the Pacific Institute’s Business Framework for Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic issue brief series continues to explore the role of businesses in a robust COVID-19 response, outlining how businesses can contribute to a “blue” economic recovery and help make society more resilient to future shocks.

Many of the worst, most visible impacts of climate change will be felt through our relationship with water. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the fragility of our water systems, not only to climate change, but to many other crises. We must make our water systems resilient to potential major societal disruptions, including global pandemics, natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes, and severe recessions.

Much has been made of a “green” recovery to COVID-19, one that simultaneously stimulates and strengthens the economy and advances critical climate goals that ultimately make our economies more sustainable and equitable. But this “green” recovery to COVID-19 must also be “blue”: a robust economic recovery goes hand in hand with water stewardship. Investing in drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene saves lives, aids climate change mitigation and adaption, and brings economic benefits.

In this Series

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Business Framework for Water and COVID-19: Rebuilding and Resilience

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Business Framework for Water & COVID-19: Practical Actions to Contain the Pandemic

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Equity Dimensions of Utility Disconnections in the U.S.

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Ensuring Access to Water as Shutoff Moratoriums Lift

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Impacts on Municipal Water Demand

Fact Sheet: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Reopening Buildings After Shutdowns: Reducing Water-Related Health Risks

October 30, 2020March 13, 2021

Key Take-Aways from the Webinar on Setting Site Water Targets to Drive Action in India and South Africa

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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

Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds Landscape Assessment

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Nature-based solution (NBS) can improve degraded ecosystems, help sequester carbon, and manage the effects of climate change, including extreme weather events. Businesses are beginning to recognize the value of NBS for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. But NBS is underutilized in the business sector, partly because of a lack of frameworks and tools for identifying the benefits and for monetizing the full scope of co-benefits provided by NBS projects.

This “landscape assessment” of nature-based solutions for the business sector examines contemporary thinking around NBS and provides business case studies and interviews, towards a thorough understanding of the key opportunities and challenges of NBS for businesses. The report was produced by the UN Global Compact’s CEO Water Mandate, which the Pacific Institute serves as Co-Secretariat for, in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy and Danone S.A.

In this Series

Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds: Guide

August 3, 2020March 13, 2021

Why Should Your Business Be Interested in Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds?

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By Carla Műller-Zantop (Danone S.A.), Michael Matosich (The Nature Conservancy), Kari Vigerstol (The Nature Conservancy), Naabia Ofosu-Amaah (The Nature Conservancy), and Gregg Brill (Pacific Institute and CEO Water Mandate)

The Problem

Physical, Reputational, and Regulatory — Source: ceowatermandate.org

As large users of natural resources, including water, the private sector has disproportionate impacts and dependencies on natural capital¹. These impacts and dependencies play out across physical, reputational and regulatory factors, and across the interface between company risks and risks due to a particular watershed. All of these issues affect private sector bottom lines and long-term well-being.

The private sector has a critical role to play in addressing many environmental, social, and economic challenges faced today. To this end, a multi-organizational project (including the CEO Water Mandate, the Pacific Institute, The Nature Conservancy, Danone, and LimnoTech) is looking to understand the opportunities for businesses to invest in nature-based solutions (NBS) to address societal challenges. The project team have recently published a Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds Landscape Assessment to better this understanding. This assessment:

Explores the concept, definitions, and classifications of NBS;
Identifies the barriers to scaling NBS;
Reviews available frameworks or methods for evaluating, measuring, and demonstrating the value of NBS benefits; and
Examines opportunities to scale NBS.

Using Nature to Solve Societal Challenges

Historically, the private sector has addressed water security through developing engineered solutions to store, treat, distribute, and dispose of water. Although many of these solutions have proven successful at meeting their primary objectives, they come at considerable costs to business and the environment. For example, a reservoir or dam may be built to store water. This water needs to be pumped to treatment works and then on to the end user. All of this infrastructure comes at considerable capital and maintenance costs. The environmental costs are significant too², and include loss of habitat, changing local hydrology, and disposal of wastewater to the environment. It is seldom the case that the full suite of costs (economic, social, and ecological) are factored into decision making when investing in engineered solutions.

But the reliance on solely engineered solutions to solve critical water challenges is changing. The private sector is increasingly realizing that it has, at its fingertips, various approaches that rely on nature – not just engineered solutions – to build water security in line with their existing business models.

These approaches are known as “nature-based solutions.”

The private sector is increasingly realizing it has, at its fingertips, various approaches that rely on nature – not just engineered solutions – to build water security in line with their existing business models. These approaches are known as “nature-based solutions.”

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are actions to restore, manage, and protect natural ecosystems in order to secure ecosystem goods and services that nature provides and performs. Working with nature offers significant opportunities to businesses to meet broader environmental, social, and economic objectives. Instead of relying solely on traditional “gray infrastructure”, companies can combine these efforts with natural solutions or “green infrastructure” (e.g. using wetlands to filter and store water, rather than industrial filtration systems and storage tanks). This allows natural systems to provide vital provisioning and regulatory functions, such as filtration functions of soils and natural vegetation to:

Improve water quality;
Reduce erosion and sediment loading;
Lower pollution into waterways and groundwater; and
Regulate seasonal water flows.

Investments in NBS can offer solutions that are both cost-effective and flexible, and are therefore of increasing interest to the private sector and other stakeholders. NBS allow ecosystems to provide water quality and quantity benefits, as well as multiple other co benefits including carbon sequestration; increased biodiversity; and social, cultural, health, and economic benefits^{3, 4}. In addition, carefully planned natural climate solutions using NBS have the global potential to deliver 37% of carbon mitigation⁵ needed within the next decade to stabilize global warming temperatures to below the 2° C target.

Unique Opportunities for the Private Sector

As the private sector prioritizes building resilience, more and more companies are turning to NBS to support their long-term goals and business continuity objectives. According to GreenBiz⁶, over 350 companies have made commitments to help reverse biodiversity loss and restore natural systems on which economic activity depends. In 2019, Amazon⁷ pledged USD $100 million to support natural climate solutions, while Unilever⁸ pledged €1 billion towards its climate and nature fund in 2020.

As the private sector prioritizes building resilience, more and more companies are turning to nature-based solutions to support their long-term goals and business continuity objectives.

To improve the sustainability of business operations as well as the environment, it is critical that more companies invest in the enhancement of natural capital and the use of NBS to create more resource-efficient societies.

So what is holding the private sector back?

Barriers to Private Sector Implementation of Nature-Based Solutions

While NBS can substantially improve ecosystem functioning and quality, they currently remain underutilized, partly because of:

A lack of understanding of the full range of potential benefits of NBS, from both an ecosystem perspective and a business perspective;
A lack of common metrics for measuring or quantifying the multiple benefits derived from NBS;
A lack of public and private sector policy and governance frameworks and tools for identifying or monetizing the full scope of benefits and co-benefits provided by NBS; and
Limited financing for NBS projects or a lack of incentives for investing in NBS.

For a more in-depth look at the challenges and barriers companies are facing, please refer to the Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds Landscape Assessment.

The Way Forward

It is clear that in order to sustainably meet the needs of the private sector, society, and nature, and to ensure that companies build long-term economic resilience, we will collectively need to improve ecosystem functioning and quality. Action needs to be taken now, to not only improve ecosystems at broad scales, but also embrace nature in solving many of the challenges we face today.

Action needs to be taken now, to not only improve ecosystems at broad scales, but also embrace nature in solving many of the challenges we face today.

To achieve these goals, the public sector could:

Create appropriate regulations, policies, and legislations that promote the use of NBS;
Provide development incentives, payment for ecosystem services schemes, stormwater fee discounts, green bonds, and tax increment financing;
Adjust building codes and project development protocols to encourage the use of NBS;
Enable credit enhancement and provide grants, rebates, and favorable financing terms; and
Create collaborative governance and management mechanisms to promote partnership development around NBS investments9.

Businesses can advocate for these NBS-friendly policies and raise awareness of this opportunity through:

Investing in NBS projects at scale with innovative sustainable financing;
Supporting public-private partnerships and collaborative governance structures; and
Providing sector leadership by encouraging other companies in their economic sectors or within their supply chains to support NBS opportunities10.

NBS have the potential to drive transformation in the private sector to meet long-term resilience goals. Companies can use these solutions to reshape their economic models to include added value from natural and social benefits while simultaneously achieving economic growth. To do this, they should look beyond the boundaries of their factory fences and broaden positive influence at the watershed level using nature as inspiration. No single business or government agency can tackle the multitude of societal and environmental challenges alone. In this context, NBS can support collaborative governance objectives, at a time where joint action is needed more than ever.

[Pull quote: Companies can use nature-based solutions to reshape their economic models to include added value from natural and social benefits while simultaneously achieving economic growth. To do this, they should look beyond the boundaries of their factory fences and broaden positive influence at the watershed level using nature as inspiration.]

For more information on the Benefit Accounting of Nature Based Solutions for Watersheds project, please visit the Benefit Accounting of Nature-Based Solutions for Watersheds project page.

Água e a Pandemia da COVID-19: Um Plano Empresarial para Água e COVID-19: Ações Práticas para Conter a Pandemia

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Para combater a propagação da COVID-19 e reconstruir nossas economias durante e após a pandemia, uma ação coletiva em relação à água é essencial. Tal ação pode ajudar não apenas a conter o vírus, como também a realizar o direito humano à água e acelerar a economia “azul”, na qual o bem-estar econômico e a resiliência hídrica se reforçam mutuamente. A comunidade empresarial pode desempenhar um papel fundamental no combate à disseminação da COVID-19, bem como reconstruir a economia e reduzir o risco de choques futuros.

Este Resumo de Questões, desenvolvido pelo Pacific Institute em sua função de secretaria conjunta do CEO Water Mandate do Pacto Global da ONU, com a contribuição e experiência da ONG global de água, saneamento e higiene (WASH) WaterAid, visa articular essa função. Ele articula as conexões entre a água, a COVID-19 e a comunidade empresarial; oferece uma estrutura prática sobre as ações que as empresas podem adotar para promover os esforços de resposta à COVID-19 em suas operações, cadeias de abastecimento e nas comunidades onde os trabalhadores vivem; e conecta empresas a recursos de capacitação e exemplos práticos de ações relacionadas à água que as empresas estão realizando em resposta à COVID-19.

In this Series

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Equity Dimensions of Utility Disconnections in the U.S.

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Ensuring Access to Water as Shutoff Moratoriums Lift

Issue Brief: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Impacts on Municipal Water Demand

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English: Water and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Business Framework for Water & COVID-19: Practical Actions to Contain the Pandemic