WAVE: Water Stewardship Verified

WATER STEWARDSHIP IS AN INCREASING PRIORITY

As businesses across the globe confront increasing water-related challenges impacting their operations and supply chains, company leaders are facing increased pressure from investors, customers and other stakeholders with regard to water-related performance. To meaningfully and credibly address water risk and enhance brand value, companies need to move beyond the “water management” paradigm of arbitrary water-use targets and strategize around the principles of good water stewardship.

Currently, there is a lack of common understanding in the marketplace around what constitutes credible “good corporate water stewardship.” Stakeholders are generally dissatisfied with how existing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and other sustainability reporting frameworks address corporate water stewardship performance. The Water Council, learning from 10+ years of experience working with companies on water stewardship, developed the WAVE program to address this issue.

THE WATER COUNCIL’S WAVE: ACCELERATING CORPORATE WATER STEWARDSHIP

The Water Council’s WAVE program gives companies a way to improve their water stewardship and, importantly, have it independently verified. It is a six-step methodology for improving, reporting and recognizing good corporate water stewardship.

By following the six steps, companies demonstrate that they are strategically prioritizing water-related action where it matters most. This leads to more meaningful water-related goals, targets and outcomes.

INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION: CREDIBLY REPORTING OUTCOMES

The WAVE program concludes with independent verification provided by SCS Global Services. This ultimately ensures that companies can be confident that they are credibly communicating their water stewardship efforts to key stakeholders and the public.

WAVE 1.1

The Water Council is pleased to announce the launch of WAVE (Water Stewardship Verified) 1.1. After more than a year of use and feedback from implementers and WAVE verified organizations, TWC has made some slight adjustments to the Normative Document, Implementation Guide and Conformity Matrix. These changes are slight but important and include:

Revised language to reflect program usage interest from all types of organizations, not just corporations, including universities, privately held companies and public utilities.
Revised language and metrics to reflect usage and interest from organizations with direct operations as well as organizations where most water use and risk lives in their value chain and outside their direct operational control.
Re-ordered steps to reflect actual implementation progression of WAVE participants to date.

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wave participants

These companies are going through the WAVE’s six-step methodology in order to improve their water stewardship performance and reporting.

WAVE Verified

The following companies have been independently WAVE Verified by SCS Global Services, meaning they have assessed water-related risk across the enterprise, identified the highest water-related impacts using credible water-related data and implemented best practice in improving water stewardship performance.