The World Resources Institute, Pacific Institute, and UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate are working with businesses to develop a database on public water management in the US and Mexico. This forum is an invitation for businesses to collaborate, an opportunity to address questions, and a place to learn more about the project.
This paper discusses a methodology to forecast conflict up to a year in advance. The model is a product of the Water, Peace, and Security partnership, which is pioneering the development of public information tools and approaches that can support evidence-based actions to reduce security risks and promote water cooperation.
This working paper provides the first comprehensive approach that organizations can use to calculate water withdrawals and consumption associated with purchased electricity. It provides international country-level and U.S. subnational-level water use factors detailing grid average water withdrawal and consumption resulting from electricity consumption.
Dive into WRI's research that culminated in the recent publication, Achieving Abundance. WRI Water experts will discuss what the findings reveal about the state of water security around the world and investigate what role investors can play.
While agriculture and industry withdraw the majority of the world’s freshwater (70% and 19%, respectively), demand from households is rising precipitously.
New WRI research shows how countries can achieve water security for all by 2030. The economic benefits of investing in sustainable water management far outweigh the costs.
This paper proposes a framework to calculate the cost required to deliver sustainable water management to a geography. The paper then applies the framework to estimate the costs of delivering sustainable water management for all countries and major basins around the world.
Climate scientists recently found that extreme heat is leading to more pre-term births, warming waters in New England are linked to a decline in fishermen, and unprecedented changes in the Arctic show the region is changing more quickly than anticipated. This post summarizes these and other studies published in December 2019.
What if we could predict violent conflicts before they arise and help stop them? A groundbreaking new tool, launched today by the Water, Peace and Security (WPS) partnership, can predict the risk of violent conflicts up to 12 months ahead of time.
About 2,000 administrative districts across the Global South — about 14% of all surveyed — are at risk of violent conflict between October 2019 and September 2020.
Data on Aqueduct Food reveals that one-third of the world's irrigated crops are grown in areas facing extremely high water stress.
Water-related risk is a growing economic threat. The private sector has a unique opportunity to shift corporate culture toward more sustainable practices that will spur long-term solutions to systemic water problems.
WRI Water Program Director Betsy Otto knows the world should be worried about water: Her team's research showed this year that one-quarter of the world's population lives in extreme water stress. In this conversation, though, she talks about the solutions—technological, political, and managerial—that can alleviate the strain.
When Cape Town and Chennai nearly ran out of water, these two cities managed to avert Day Zero, while revealing broad social inequity in both places. World Cities Day is a good moment to consider the lessons to be learned about equitable responses to water crises.
This paper provides quantitative evidence to help investors better understand and measure the financial impacts from water shortages in the thermal power sector, drawing on data and analysis of Indian companies. It introduces a new methodology to estimate the water shortage-induced impacts to earnings on five Indian thermal power companies from FY 2014-2017. It also uses outputs from climate models to analyze potential future changes to water availability in India, which could increase the risk of water shortages.
African countries face some of the highest water risk in the world, now exacerbated by climate change. But management and investment are often bigger challenges. Tackling them can strengthen economies and build countries' resilience to climate change.
This guide aims to help companies set effective site water targets that are informed by catchment context, which can create value and lessen risks for the company and support collective action.
Building on recent applications in Latin America, this paper overviews WRI’s Green-Gray Assessment method, and provides recommendations for applications.
This paper provides a methodology to calculate and valuate the benefits of water stewardship activities. This new method enables businesses and other key stakeholders to better tackle shared water risks at catchment-scale.
The Natural Infrastructure for Aquifer Recharge Financial Calculator, is an excel based tool with a flexible financial model that estimates the private costs and benefits, including the return on investment (ROI), of natural infrastructure interventions designed to enhance aquifer recharge. The technical note explains the methods, data and assumptions used to produce the tool.