Sustainable Water Management

What cannot be measured cannot be managed. Poor water management poses major risks to agriculture, industry, and local communities. However, there is a critical lack of information available about local water conditions – making better management difficult. WRI’s Water Program studies local water data and governance, and shares best practices in order to advance context-driven, meaningful water management.

WRI and MIT Sloan School of Management are currently working to map public water risk by harmonizing and sharing water risk information among a variety of actors. The first step is to collect information on indicators of water management, and five indicators have been selected as proxies for water management:

• Access to information on water quantity and quality
• State of infrastructure
• Local water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) conditions
• Existence and enforcement of allocations and caps
• Local pricing systems

After collecting and compiling, we aim to share our empirical, comparable, and global data in an open-source database that is available to the public and serves diverse stakeholders.

To advance this work, we are seeking partnerships with multinational companies to share non-sensitive data on public water management. Collecting data through multinational companies rapidly amasses water management data – information which is valuable for businesses, investors, NGOs, governments, and governance institutions.

Participating companies can…

• Rely on a carefully developed, common method to collect data on public water management. The question set and database is designed for company needs and aligns participating companies with the current thought leadership and water management frameworks. This alignment creates concerted effort towards resolving water management issues negatively affecting companies, and standardizes access to information.
• Extend their field of vision beyond their own facilities, supporting supply chain risk assessments and future siting due diligence.
• Implement a cost-efficient strategy to build momentum towards improvements in water management, and thereby reduce water related risks in operating sites – by providing open access data to other companies, policy makers, investors, and advocacy groups.

For questions and more information contact: Colin.Strong@wri.org