CEO Water Mandate sets ambitious goals to scale water stewardship in strategic plan

This World Water Day, I am thrilled to release the 2019 update to the Mandate’s 2018-2020 Strategic Plan. I believe this plan represents the initiative’s most ambitious, impactful, and wide-reaching efforts in its 11-year history.

The work plan outlines the initiatives’ four focus areas, on-the-ground projects, and strategic goals we intend to pursue via our Action Platform, where all the Mandate’s programmatic work is housed. It lays out a roadmap for how the Mandate and its endorsing companies can advance water security around the world, and in so doing help manage the many water risks facing businesses, communities, and ecosystems.

Since 2007, the CEO Water Mandate has advanced responsible water practices among businesses from a wide range of industries and geographies. In that time, the Mandate – a special initiative of the UN Secretary-General and the UN Global Compact, implemented in partnership with the Pacific Institute – has garnered commitments to water stewardship from over 150 companies, including AB InBev, Bayer, BHP, Danone, Dow Chemical, GlaxoSmithKline, Hilton, Levi Strauss, Mars, Nestle, Nike, Unilever, and many others. We have also developed a wide range of capacity building resources and facilitated on-the-ground collective action projects to help those companies put their commitments into action.

This 2019 update to our strategic plan offers up the next chapter in the Mandate’s journey to make water stewardship a mainstream practice for the global business community.

Goals & outcomes

In the plan, we at the Mandate Secretariat commit to pursuing four overarching goals, to be achieved by the end of 2020, that will ensure we drive meaningful impact:

  1. Garner water stewardship commitments from 150 new companies, doubling our endorser base
  2. Achieve 1 million views for the Mandate’s online capacity building resources (e.g., Water Action Hub, Water Stewardship Toolbox, etc.)
  3. Engage 175 organizations in Mandate-related collective action projects and initiatives
  4. Launch and/or maintain 15 Mandate-related collective action projects measuring progress against SDGs and other policy objectives

These goals are crafted to target both “learners” and “leaders” – aiming to reach a new generation of companies who are just beginning to think about water while also deepening and expanding the practice of companies with many years of stewardship experience. In pursuit of these goals, we will be landing place-based projects across the world, including projects in North America, South America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, to ensure that stewardship gains traction as a global phenomenon.

Ultimately, we hope our efforts will produce three outcomes essential to scaling stewardship among the global business community:

  1. Increased uptake of stewardship best practices by companies new to the topic
  2. Increased uptake of collective action activities
  3. Enhanced ability to measure the impacts of local stewardship efforts relative to SDG6 and domestic public policy goals

How you can get involved

We at the Mandate cannot achieve these ambitious goals by ourselves. As with the targets laid out in Sustainable Development Goal 6 on Water and Sanitation, the Mandate’s goals can only be accomplished through coordination and collaboration among a wide range of actors. As such, we invite businesses, NGOs, academics, governments, and others to join and support our efforts to scale water stewardship around the world.

  • If you are a business new to water stewardship, join the global stewardship community by endorsing the CEO Water Mandate’s six commitment areas.
  • If you are a current Mandate endorsing company and wish to get more actively involved, join the Mandate’s Action Platform.
  • If you are a non-business entity that would like to support our efforts, we’d be delighted to discuss how you can get involved. Please feel free to reach out to my colleague Mai-Lan Ha at: ha@unglobalcompact.org.
Read the Strategic Plan

Jason Morrison
Head, CEO Water Mandate
President, Pacific Institute

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Jason Morrison, Pacific Institute
Jason Morrison is the President of the Pacific Institute. Jason also serves as the Head of the CEO Water Mandate. He is also a co-founder of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS), a global initiative that has developed and is now implementing a freshwater certification program to advance responsible water practices by water providers and large-scale users. Jason received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego and a Master’s Degree in Energy and Environmental Studies from Boston University.