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Water Resilience Assessment Framework

A framework to advance water resilience
  • Overview
  • Engagement Opportunities
  • Guidance, Tools, & Resources
  • Webinars

Overview

Project Background

Climate change, extreme events, pandemics, political instability, competing demands, and other shocks and stresses are impacting water systems around the world. These impacts are increasing in intensity, likelihood, and frequency. These unpredictable changes in the system are severely impacting the ability of organizations and communities to thrive. These changes will not only impact water quantity and quality but also the access to and provision of other water-related goods and services. These drivers have exposed the vulnerabilities of the entire water system and laid bare our global connections and inter-reliance.

There is an urgent need to address the impact of these challenges through developing resilient socio-economic, institutional, and biophysical systems, as the provision of goods and services from water systems are interconnected and influence energy, agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, and other key sectors. Decision-makers require practical actions and strategies with the means to measure and monitor progress towards these goals. The key to thriving water-based economies, ecosystems, and societies under such shocks and changes is to collectively aim for water resilience.

Creating water resilience at the system level will require coordination, transparency, and alignment of common goals among all stakeholders: public, private, and civil society. A resilient basin is a pre-requisite for the collective resilience for all the stakeholders; however, basin water resilience is a necessary but not sufficient condition for individual stakeholder resilience. Additionally, a stakeholder can contribute to or detract from the overall resilience of a basin.

The project Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF), launched in 2019 with core funding from BHP, aims to develop a practical framework to support building and monitoring resilience at all levels.  The framework is developed through engagement with key stakeholders, building on their existing resilience-building efforts where available and developing shared understanding where divergence occurs, so that it can be applied by all water users, water managers, and decision-makers, in all water contexts, and at all water scales.

The project is designed in three phases: Phase I Landscape study (2019-2020), Phase II Development of the generic Framework and guidance documents for key sectors (2020-2022), Phase III Pilot testing, implementation and outreach (2023-onwards).

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Engagement Opportunities

Get Involved!

If you’d like to discuss in more detail how you and your organization can get involved or if you’d like to inquire about piloting this leading-edge tool at your company, please reach out to project coordinator Ashok Chapagain akchapagain@pacinst.org

Piloting opportunities: Corporates

If you’d like to discuss in more detail how you and your organization can get involved or if you’d like to inquire about piloting this leading-edge tool at your company, please reach out to project coordinator Ashok Chapagain (akchapagain@pacinst.org)

Download

Piloting opportunities: Utilities, Basin Managers and Planners

The guidance document for the utility sector is at the review stage of publication with an aim to publish by end of March 2023. The project team is looking for active collaboration opportunities to pilot the framework with utilities from diverse contexts ranging from small to medium, providing services in developed and developing nations, independently isolated utilities to connected multi-level utilities (wastewater treatment to drinking water suppliers) etc.

Guidance, Tools, & Resources

Guidance documents

Each sector-specific guidance document further aims to

  • Identify and describe the existing institutional processes, frameworks and indicators, tools and models being used to monitor changes in water system conditions over time;
  • support in identifying and monitoring drivers of change, develop scenarios, establish resiliency goals, use adaptive and scenario planning, make investment decisions, quantify and develop performance metrics, and incorporate stakeholder engagement into the adaptive planning process;
  • highlight the value and limitations of trigger points and monitoring, and determine and provide examples of sector-specific best practices in resilience efforts.

Complete WRAF Report - August 2021

1. Water Resilience Assessment Framework

The Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF) helps to:

  • identify and assess resilience characteristics specific to a system,
  • propose resilience indicators that can be both measured, tracked, and communicated to relevant stakeholders,
  • develop and test the impact of a plausible set of actions in building resilience, and
  • develop a resilience strategy to help guide utilities and local communities toward more resilient systems.

The WRAF is designed to work with risk assessment and reduction frameworks while also integrating recent global lessons about uncertainty and systems resilience. The WRAF supports stakeholders to build dynamic water and climate resilience that matches our dynamic world.

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Water Resilience Assessment Framework: Corporate Guidance

2. Water Resilience Assessment Framework: Corporate Guidance

The WRAF provides a foundation for sector-specific applications. This guidance is part of a series of detailed documents guiding implementations.

Building long-term water resilience is essential for a company aiming to mitigate or adapt to current and future shocks and stresses. This guidance is designed to encourage companies to engage with the water systems critical to ensuring sustained business operations over time and to plan for future trends, possibilities, and risks. It provides a standard, step-wise approach to measuring and enhancing resilience across different industries and provides a set of ‘Water Resilience Indicators’ and a ‘Resilience Scoring Tool’ for corporates. Practical examples are provided throughout the guidance document to showcase how each step could be implemented in practice. Applicable to small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMMEs), as well as large multinational corporations with supply chains across different geographies, this detailed guidance on WRAF for corporates, is a step forward for businesses to start embedding resilience into their policy and practices.

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Resilience Scoring Tool - ReST 1.0

3. Resilience Scoring Tool ReST 1.0

Developed by the project team, the Resilience Scoring Tool – ReST 1.0 for corporates is a user-friendly Excel tool that can be used to select key resilience indicators, based on relevant system components and subcomponents under each of the resilience characteristics. The ReST can be used by businesses to explore and build their resilience across on-site operations, supply chains, and systems. The tool is designed to complement and build on many of the existing corporate water stewardship materials and traditional stewardship and risk-based information.

The lead sponsor for this project is BHP, supported by CEO Water Mandate endorsing companies and the Swiss Development Corporation.

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Other Guidance Documents in the Pipelines

Two guidance documents in the pipeline are:

  • Guidance for utilities (in review stage for publication)
  • Guidance for basin managers, planning authorities (regional and national) (in development)
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Webinars

Stockholm World Water Week Webinar 2021

Stockholm World Water Week Webinar 2020

Our Vision

The CEO Water Mandate, in partnership with the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), World Resources Institute (WRI), and Pacific Institute (PI), have embarked on a journey to develop a common framework to develop basin water resilience. Formally launched in 2019 with seed funding from BHP, the framework will be developed through engagement with key stakeholders, incorporating their common accounting practices where available and developing shared understanding where divergence occurs, so that it can be applied by all water users, water managers, and decision-makers, in all water contexts, and at all water scales. The project is designed in three phases: Phase I (Landscape study completed in early 2020), Phase II (Framework development and pilot testing, ongoing), and Phase III (Implementation and outreach), with stakeholder engagement continued in parallel throughout the life of the project.

Objectives of this Research

The project aims the following key objectives:

  1. Develop a globally accepted, comprehensive generic framework (WRAF) to support building resilience and monitoring efforts at all levels for all stakeholders, including ecosystems and vulnerable communities;
  2. Develop sector-specific guidance documents to apply the WRAF for key sectors tailored to align and meet unique contexts e.g., corporates, utilities, and basin managers, planners, and authorities, etc.
  3. Develop supporting materials such as resilience indicators for the selected sectors, Resilience scoring tools, etc.

Project Partners

CEO Water Mandate, Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), World Resources Institute (WRI), and Pacific Institute (PI)

CEO Water Mandate logo RGB-01
UMass Amherst logo

Funding Support

The lead sponsor for this project is BHP, supported by CEO Water Mandate endorsing companies and the Swiss Development Corporation.

CEO Water Mandate logo RGB-01

Stakeholder Advisory Group

Eugenio Barrios, Independent expert

Jan Cassin, Forest Trends Association

Johannes Cullman, WMO

Neil Dhot, AquaFed

Louise Ellis, Arup

Nate Engle, Water Global Practice, World Bank

Elsa Favrot-Monier, ENGIE

Tatiana Fedotova, Independent consultant on sustainability and water

Danielle Gaillard-Picher, Global Water Partnership

Catherine-Candice Koffman, Nedbank Ltd

Karin Maria Krchnak, 2030 Water Resources Group, World Bank

Katy Lackey, US Water Alliance

Nick Martin, BIER

Ruth Mathews, SIWI

Juliet Mian, The Resilience Shift

Catherine Moncrieff, CDP

Peter Newborne, ODI

Belynda Petrie, OneWorld Sustainable Investments

Hanna Plotnykova, OSCE

Diego Rodriguez, Global Water Practice, World Bank

Martin Shouler, The Resilience Shift

Kate Stoughton, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Kari Vigerstol, The Nature Conservancy

Tom Williams, WBCSD

Jed Youngs, BHP

Dr. Ashok Chapagain

Pacific Institute
Project Lead

CONTACT

CEO Water Mandate

UN Global Compact | Pacific Institute

ceowatermandate@unglobalcompact.org

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