2degrees World Water Week Highlights

As Stockholm World Water Week draws to a close, I'd like to describe some of the week's highlights.

 

1. Tuesday’s Corporate Water Risk Management: Seeking Solutions seminar in partnership with GEMI (Global Environmental Management Initiative).

The seminar offered an interactive platform bringing together key stakeholder groups that are driving the issue of corporate water management forward. It showcased different tools and approaches under development and started to explore how they fit together by addressing a variety of needs.  Sylvain Lhôte, WBCSD Chair introduced the session and put forward the important statement: Business cannot succeed in a society that fails.

 

We heard about the following tools for managing corporate water risk (access slides here):

·         World Resources Institute’s work on the AQUADUCT Tool to measure and map water risk;

·         The Ceres Water Framework – a methodology and tool to help investors assess the quality of corporate water management; 

·         TheGEMI Local Water Tool™ which helps companies conduct systematic assessments of their relationship to water in order to create site-specific sustainable water management strategies;

·         and the Watershed Sustainability Assessment, a process developed by The Nature Conservancy and PepsiCo, which addresses the need to focus on local watersheds in water risk assessment.

 

2. Developments in Water Footprinting

Another fascinating session was Sustainability of Water Footprints: From Assessment to Strategic Response which included presentations from Ulrike Sapiro at Coca Cola Europe, Renée Andersson at Swedish Textile Water Initiative, Guy Pegram and Elizabeth Hastings at Pegasys, Stuart Orr at WWF and Brian Richter, TNC.  In his blog post, Marty Matlock, University of Arkansas wrote that Arjen Hoekstra (New Global Data slides available here) and Ruth Mathews at the Water Footprint network “set a very strong pace with their roll-out of the Water Footprint Network (WFN) datasets for assessing supply chain water impact and risk.”

 

Anyone interested in water footprinting should read this blog post by Dr Laurel Standley, a member of the U.S. Delegate to ISO TC 207 (Environmental Management Committee)about ISO’s development of a water footprint assessment in a life cycle assessment context.

 

3. The UN-Water Seminar: World Water Day 2012 - Water and Food Security: Call for Solutions

One of the most pressing issues to be addressed at World Water Week was how to ensure water and food security.  The seminar called upon a large panel of experts from diverse backgrounds to look at possible solutions to water and food security.  In his presentation, Alexander Müller, Assistant Director General, Natural Resources Management and Environment at FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) said that investing in irrigation where it is possible, improving the efficiency of agriculture's use of water, and adopting water-smart farming practices can all help to ensure food and water security. Tony Allan (slides here) spoke about the importance of addressing sustainable intensification, understanding the food supply value chain, reducing waste, understanding consumption, and raising awareness and creating shared value in the supply chain.

 

4. Marielle Canter Weikel’s blog post, Fresh Water: A Risky Business? 

Marielle is the director of corporate freshwater strategies in Conservation International’s Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB) and has recently joined the Water Risk and Strategy Working Group Advisory Board.  On Thursday, we were delighted to stream a session in which Marielle spoke about the WBCSD’s Global Water Tool in relation to freshwater conservation in an urbanizing world, alongside a number of leading researchers developing tools and for freshwater conservation.  Access the recording: Science and Tools for Freshwater Conservation in an Urbanizing World.

 

5. Improving Sustainability of Sanitation Facilities

David Schaub-Jones, Program Director - Africa at Building Partnerships for Development (BPD) ran a very impressive and interactive session on Helping Entrepreneurs Provide Sustainable Sanitation Services.  The seminar invited responses (from the audience and online attendees) to the statements, “Subsidize poor households not sanitation businesses,” and “Rather than turn sanitation 'people' into businesses, we should get 'real' businesspeople interested in sanitation.”  The speakers included: Gustavo Heredia, Fundacion Aguatuya, Bolivia; Ashley Murray, Waste Enterprisers, Ghana and Kate Harawa, Water for People, Malawi, and their slides are available here.

 

WaterAid had a very strong presence at the week, and they launched a new online resource, WASHwatch.org to help strengthen the call for improved water and sanitation facilities.  View the blog post by WaterAid’s Laura Crowley on 2degrees.

 

Also, don’t miss these resources in the Water Risk and Strategy Working Group:

·         Blog by Catherine Moncrieff, Freshwater Programme Manager at WWF: How WWF, SABMiller and GIZ are Tackling Water Risk Through Teamwork. Read more in their report Water Futures.

·         Video: Social Entrepreneurs Want Sustainable Change: WBCSD water project

·         Recording of the session: Which Water Quality for Which Uses? A Regulators' and Practitioners' Perspective which addressed whether water quality standards and guidelines can protect water resources for multiple ecosystem services, and water uses.

·         Access recordings of presentations from Andreas Kanzler, Head of Water Section, GIZ and Fernando Veiga, Water Funds Manager - Latin America Region, The Nature Conservancy from the seminar: Water & Climate in Focus: Effective adaptation across political, social and institutional boundaries

·         Report from PepsiCo and The Nature Conservancy: Striving for Positive Water Impact - Partnership Approach in Five Watersheds

 

 

Whenever politicians are involved it is an art not a science

The launch of www.WASHwatch.org by SHARE partner WaterAid was an inspiring start to Tuesday afternoon. The online wiki-style tool is an innovative way of holding governments to account regarding their WASH spending commitments. Ian Ross, Policy Researcher at WaterAid, showed on-screen how you can track a developing country's progress against promises made at the major regional WASH conferences, such as SACOSAN in South Asia and AfricaSan in Africa.

 

Each country is assessed against 10 specific commitments for water and another 10 for sanitation. The figures are totted up to give an overall score out of 20, with 20 being the top, for progress on a) water and b) sanitation.

 

Recognised experts, identified by their name and organisation, update the real-time scores and analysis. Then anyone else can comment on these changing assessments and can select to "watch" a country to receive updates whenever changes are made. More collaborators are sought for steering committee, so please get in touch with washwatch@gmail.com if you are interested.

 

Later in the afternoon I sneaked into the remainder of a day-long workshop on financing urban infrastructure. Many issues were discussed, including affordability, cost recovery, subsidies, and the implications of different types of charges, such as one-off water supply connection fees and water consumption charges.

 

Gerard Payen, of AquaFed, co-chaired the session and made the closing remarks. He referred to the political decisions which need to be made: is the priority cost recovery or affordability? This point echoed comments from Monica Scatasta, of the European Investment Bank, earlier in the session. She said: "Whenever politicians are involved it is an art not a science."
 
For more blog posts from the DFID-funded SHARE consortium on sanitation and hygiene research visit www.shareresearch.org .

The age of pilot projects is gone. We have so many pilots, that we don't have enough planes

Monday was packed with figures about current and future challenges, and some exciting
ideas and case studies about solving the sanitation crisis.

These were some of the most striking figures:
• 800 million people in urban areas lack access to sanitation
• 6.3 billion people will live in cities by 2050
• 60 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa lives in slums
• Only 2.3 percent of slum land is made up of roads, which are crucial for infrastructure, including sewerage and water supply (this compares to 25-35 percent in developed countries)
• 2,500 delegates are taking part in World Water Week

Sheela Patel, chair of SDI, made a plea for slums to seen differently, not as a sea of dilapidated roofs, but as communities of people producing their own solutions. She called for communities to be involved in decision-making, and not for poor people just to be brought in to rubber stamp projects.

The figures continued in the afternoon with a fascinating seminar presentation by Dinesh Meehta, of the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad, India. He explained how the city of Ahmedabad – the seventh largest in India with a population of 5.5 million – spends 10 percent of its budget on pro-poor projects, including sanitation, and how 87 percent of families have individual toilets. He emphasised the need for city-wide projects, said reaching out to the poor is possible, and referred to a joke about pilot projects. He said: "The age of pilot projects is gone. We have so many pilots, that we don't have enough planes."

For more blog posts from the DFID-funded SHARE consortium on sanitation and hygiene research visit www.shareresearch.org .