Very exciting discussions at the Sharing water: Engaging business seminar we co-organized yesterday with Wetlands International and the OECD! There was a real consensus that business needs to be involved in discussions at the watershed level. Looking at water risks beyond the company’s fenceline makes total business sense: companies can’t have a narrow view about their responsibility and wait for the system to collapse before taking action.
Forward-thinking companies have already shifted their practices from “do less harm” to “do more good”. However, one of the big hurdles of watershed collaboration is obviously data availability: how much water is there and of which quality? How many users are withdrawing water? What are the seasonal variations of water in the aquifer, etc. ?
Watershed approaches should also include the question of water allocation. In water-stressed watersheds, water should be allocated in a way that allows for the values for society, the economy and the environment to be maximized. But in real life, this is not easy to do! Market mechanisms also tend to be considered as “easy-wins” solutions, but they require a complex set of policy mechanisms and institutions to work properly. Markets are not the answer to every issue…
The seminar was also the opportunity for us to release the Business Guide to Water Valuation, which was very well received in Stockholm.The different business case studies presented during the seminar demonstrated that valuation is indeed a useful tool that can support business decision-making. The nature of the questions raised by the audience during the panel discussion also showed that the level of discussion has incredibly progressed since last year. At the water valuation side-event we organized at the 2012 WWW, we were under the impression that delegates were discovering water valuation – whereas yesterday, discussions were at a more technical level. It was also encouraging to see quite a number of business participants in the audience who were already considering using valuation. The key challenge in the coming years though, will be about whether we can come up with a common methodology that all companies can use and that allows the results of valuation studies to be comparable.
Listen to Mathieu Tolian from Veolia Water speak about the business guide for water valuation:
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