For Corporations at COP28: Water and Climate Talking Points

At the request of a colleague at a big global firm that identifies strongly in the water space, Adrian Sym at the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) and I put together a few talking points that match some of the issues relevant to the private sector at COP28:

• Communicate that resilience should be a very high priority for economic security, and water resilience is a key mechanism for ensuring resilience across sectors and investments.

• Ensure that a broad range of stakeholders are involved in setting national priorities on adaptation and resilience as the next round of NDCs are developed. This should include the private sector, in addition to subnational government levels and civil society, capturing and coordinating the actions of the public and private sectors for coherence and a shared vision. 

• Establish an understanding of resilience in the same holistic and communal sense as water stewardship.  Where water stewardship actions include catchment stakeholders in pursuit of shared water challenges, water resilient outcomes should encompass employees and partners as well as the whole communities in which businesses operate.  

• Advocate that economic development planning and investment should move beyond simple de-risking and should focus on water-centered resilience. 

• Measure resilience directly so that it guides planning and investment. Water quantity and quality are not resilience measures per se, but many water resource management variables are more pertinent.