Corporate water stewardship has long focused on volumes, yet water quality concerns are rising on the public's and private sector's agenda. Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) has supported the private sector with valuing the volumetric water outputs of water stewardship activities, but comparable guidance has been lacking for water quality projects. Building on VWBA's success, this guidebook provides corporate water stewardship practitioners and project implementers with a six-step process for Water Quality Benefit Accounting (WQBA). Developed with extensive consultation with relevant parties, WQBA provides principle-based, voluntary, and nonprescriptive guidance for companies seeking to make credible water quality benefit claims in a consistent way. As the first resource of its kind, WQBA provides reputable programmatic guidance and methods for companies reporting against water quality goals and gives more companies the confidence they need to make water quality commitments.

Executive Summary

Water Quality Benefit Accounting (WQBA) is an approach to support evolution of the private sector as water stewardship activities expand beyond a primary focus on water quantity challenges. Reig et al.’s (2019) Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) guidance has become a best practice resource for companies that invest in water stewardship activities to mitigate risks associated with water quantity challenges and wish to quantify the volumetric benefits of these activities. Increasingly, companies and the public are recognizing the prevalence of water quality challenges worldwide and the importance of having clean water to support economic activities and maintain public and ecosystem health (WWF and GlobeScan 2025). In turn, we are seeing more corporate commitments around improving water quality and watershed health in priority regions. This engagement is also needed to meet public policy targets related to SDG 6.3 on improving water quality by 2030 (UN n.d.).

However, as increased attention is given to water quality goals, there has not been formal guidance to provide consistent, pragmatic, and science-based principles to guide companies in making credible WQB claims that support ambitious enterprise and value chain water quality goals. The principles and steps outlined in this guidance are adapted from VWBA 2.0 (WRI et al. 2025) to help practitioners increase the likelihood that WQB outputs will generate sustainable and beneficial outcomes and impacts that complement sustainable business strategies and mitigate current and future water risks.

About this guidebook

This guidebook offers voluntary, principle-based, and nonprescriptive guidance that is applicable to a broad spectrum of water stewardship activities with water quality–related benefits. The guidance is structured to help select appropriate activities for addressing shared water quality challenges and determine water quality indicators and methods that can be used to quantify, track, report, and communicate the water quality benefits of those activities in a manner that is both practical to implement and technically robust. This WQBA guidance includes agricultural, urban, sanitation, legacy contaminant, and landscape management activities aimed at reducing nutrient, sediment, bacteria, temperature, and metal pollution. Driven by private sector demand, this publication was developed by World Resources Institute (WRI), LimnoTech, and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) with input from corporate partners and technical advisers, ensuring that it meets the needs of the private sector and leverages best available methods and resources. This guidebook may be applicable to a variety of audiences involved in water stewardship activities and was written with two primary audiences in mind: corporate water stewardship practitioners and water stewardship project implementers.

WQBA application

This guidebook outlines six steps that companies can use to identify water stewardship activities and quantify, track, report, and communicate water quality benefits (Figure ES-1).

1. Understand the local catchment context.
Since water challenges are influenced by local factors that vary significantly across different catchments, it is important to first understand the local context, which can help to identify and prioritize shared water challenges. This first step typically involves building an understanding of the political, hydrological, social, and governance conditions of the catchment as well as identifying relevant parties and their respective roles.

2. Identify and evaluate potential project activities and partners.
Ensuring alignment between a company’s stated commitments and goals and how and where WQBs are generated based on water stewardship activities is essential for making credible claims. In addition, successful execution of water stewardship activities that effectively address shared water challenges will require knowledgeable and reputable implementing partners with local expertise. Ideally, project activities should build on existing efforts in the catchment to maximize impact. Example project activities are provided in Table ES-1. WQBs generated from project activities should align with company goals. A project should:

  • have an established pathway for a quantifiable WQB;
  • address water challenges relevant to the catchment or area of interest;
  • have internal buy-in and general support from external water resources entities;
  • deliver a change beyond the without-project conditions that would not have happened without the activity;
  • have an established pathway to track and confirm project water quality outputs; and
  • assess, understand, and minimize trade-offs.

Additional project selection considerations provided in Appendix B can help practitioners prioritize projects to strengthen outcomes and impacts.

3. Quantify the WQBs of project activities.
Practitioners can identify the objectives of project activities, select the appropriate indicators and methods, and quantify the WQB. The following principles are provided to assist practitioners with quantifying WQBs:

  • Understand the objective of each project activity
  • Use practical and scientifically defensible methods
  • Identify, document, and apply conservative inputs and assumptions
  • Use an appropriate temporal scale
  • Avoid double counting of pollutant loads

A variety of methods are provided, with guidance on scenarios for appropriate application:

  • Pollutant Reduction Efficiency method
  • Simple Method
  • Universal Soil Loss Equation method
  • Treatment System method
  • Water quality monitoring method
  • Modeling method
  • Region-specific methods

4. Plan and agree.
Practitioners should understand the cost and duration of the activity and work with additional project sponsors to align on an attribution plan for each party to make credible claims. Typically, a cost-share approach is used when there is a clear understanding of total cost, expected outputs, and all parties who are providing financial support.

Prior to project implementation, tracking and reporting plans should be developed by corporate practitioners together with project implementers. Primary tracking and reporting plans should focus on ensuring that implementation activities are completed and on laying groundwork for how the WQB outputs will be quantified. Secondary tracking and reporting of longer-term benefits may also be considered, where feasible. The duration and frequency of project tracking and reporting should align with desired annual WQB claims.

By considering these components and including them in the contracting process, companies can help ensure that they will be well positioned to track, report, and communicate WQBs following implementation.

5. Implement project and track progress.
Once the project is contracted and the attribution plan and tracking and reporting plans are in place, corporate practitioners and project implementers will execute project activities and document WQB outputs with sufficient information to make WQB claims. Where possible, companies can work with project implementers and tie into existing monitoring efforts to evaluate broader desired outcomes and longer-term levels of impact.

6. Confirm and prepare for WQB communications.
WQB claims are any statement, accounting, or communication regarding the delivery of existing or anticipated WQBs that result from voluntary actions taken by the entity making the claim. Before making claims, practitioners should confirm that WQBs being claimed are delivered by activities that meet WQB eligibility criteria;

  • aligned with company goals;
  • representative of the activity’s status and duration; and
  • representative of the company’s contributions to the activity.