Survey for AGWA Members: Maximizing Collective Impact through Effective Collaboration
Over recent years, the relationship between the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) and the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) has strengthened, largely as a result of a more complete understanding of our respective areas of work and expertise and the need for complementarity.
AWS is a global network of organisational members who are committed to our mission to ignite and nurture local and global leadership in credible water stewardship. Central to AWS’s approach is a voluntary standard and certification system (AWS Standard System). The target audience for the AWS Standard is businesses who consume large volumes of freshwater in supply chains or operations.
The AWS Standard is site-based and intended to deliver positive outcomes in the context of a catchment. The unit of certification is a site but achieving certification requires understanding of catchment context, engagement of stakeholders and contributions to shared water challenges, which may also extend to public policy decisions and local, regional, or national social and environmental challenges.
AGWA is also a global network that aims to develop, crowd-source, and mainstream the emerging practice of climate resilience, especially with regard to water management. AGWA’s work includes both technical and policy programs.
Through direct engagement with our members, AGWA enables hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals globally to align their vision, co-construct tools to enable resilience, and intertwine emerging technical knowledge, finance instruments, and policy processes into synthetic, integrated tools and methodologies.
Both organisations are now recognised as leaders in their respective fields. Yet both also recognise the limits to what they can achieve on their own.
AWS has been successful in driving credible and certified water stewardship through the AWS Standard System. There are currently ca 500 sites around the world that are either certified or pursuing certification. The AWS Standard is widely recognised as reflecting best practice in water stewardship practice.
Despite this progress, scaled adoption of credible water stewardship requires support from influential organisations, notably government agencies. Policy or regulatory signals or incentives to reward AWS certification could be instrumental in driving widespread uptake and building the resilience and positive impacts that AWS was established to enable.
Resilience is a relatively novel and distinct approach to our understanding of water stewardship and sustainability more generally, especially with regard to resilience to uncertain climate impacts on the water cycle. Many approaches are emerging around assessing and adapting to water-related climate risks, while resilience is increasingly being defined in terms that focuses more on potential risks and opportunities around water-related climate shifts. Determining the role in water stewardship for risk and resilience at both site and public levels is an ongoing and serious topic for AWS, while AGWA to date has largely focused on public sector, resource management, and investment processes around these issues, with much less relative emphasis on corporate engagement.
As appreciation of water’s connection to climate increases, it is also clear that future policy incentives in relation to water use will be closely related to climate policy. Aligning the work of AWS and AGWA more closely could help policy makers and regulators understand the potential of water stewardship to contribute to climate resilience policy objectives.
AGWA has been a driving force behind securing a stronger voice for water in climate-related dialogues and resilient water decision making processes, enhancing understanding of water resilience and providing expertise and tools, e.g. the Water Tracker, to support this work.
AGWA has also established a large community of supporters but as a small, technically oriented organisation, is not able to leverage as many opportunities as it could to advance its work.
Closer alignment with AWS will provide AGWA with a platform for advancing water resilience as an essential element of water stewardship and fostering a more effective enabling environment for resilience in water stewardship.
As a result, AWS and AGWA are considering options on how to collaborate more closely. We are requesting your input through a brief survey, which is intended to help us understand what our respective communities would like to see from closer alignment between AWS and AGWA. Your input will support us in our joint efforts to maximise the collective impact of our work. Please access the survey using the button below.
Thank you for your time and input.
Adrian Sym - Chief Executive, Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS)
John Matthews - Executive Director, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA)