The Water Council, which leads efforts to position metro Milwaukee as a hub of water research and technology, is about to add a new role: the North American office of the Alliance for Water Stewardship, an international nonprofit that just finalized the first ever global water quality and risk standards.
The Milwaukee-based Water Council will make the announcement Wednesday, on the first day of its annual Water Summit, a two-day conference examining global markets for water engineering, research and policy.
Formed in 2008, the Alliance for Water Stewardship hit a milestone in April with the culmination of a four-year effort to draft a set of voluntary water stewardship criteria meant to harmonize international standards for water quality and use. The standards from the AWS, as the Germany-based group is known, were released at a conference two months ago in Lima, Peru.