World Water Week 2022: Five key takeaways

It was encouraging to see the source-to-sea approach making waves at this year’s World Water Week, but ocean solutions could still be featured more prominently.

World Water Week is the biggest global water event. This year it was a hybrid event, with a significant portion of sessions in-person in Stockholm again, following two years of pandemic-induced virtual gatherings. The theme—“Seeing the Unseen: The Value of Water”—focused on “invisible water” such as groundwater, clouds or soil moisture, as well as the water embedded within food and other goods and services. The almost 300 sessions homed in on three sub-themes: the value of water for people and development; the financial and economic value of water; and the value of water for nature and climate.

Jon Lane, chair of the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC), which helps to shape the seminars that take place during the week, highlighted this more people-centric focus: “We are moving from a conference for water people to a conference about water for people”.

Dr Lan Wang-Erlandsson of Stockholm Resilience Centre added: “This year’s theme of World Water Week hits the nail right on the head. We must see and value the unseen water: the life-supporting water hidden beneath our feet, the invisible vapour flows in the air, as well as the water in remote places that holds on to carbon stocks much larger than all fossil carbon stocks together.”

As a Key Collaborating Partner, Economist Impact contributed to the success of this year’s event. I attended the in-person segment in Stockholm as a senior rapporteur (supporting the junior rapporteurs who reported back on the key takeaways from the sessions) and speaker (for a session on financing source-to-sea action and the closing panel). My colleague Matus Samel also attended as a member of the SPC.

A sense of enthusiasm and progress was tangible, connecting the water community face to face after two consecutive virtual-only years, and in the run-up to the crucial UN Water Conference in March next year.

Five key takeaways from the event:

1. A source-to-sea approach is an important step towards global water sustainability. This approach identifies the linkages between land, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, and stimulates co-operation between upstream and downstream actors and co-ordination between sectors and countries.

2. Momentum is building for the UN Water Conference, and now is the opportunity to feed into the preparatory process.

3. More diverse voices are being heard, with representation of women now at 50%, young people almost at 40% and voices from Indigenous communities included for the first time.

4. Financial constraints are still one of the most significant obstacles when it comes to solving global water problems.

5. Although source-to-sea was on the agenda, the (fresh)water community still struggles to connect with other communities. In particular, the ocean—which accounts for around 97% of global water—did not feature prominently on the agenda.

The world faces three interconnected planetary crises—climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution—and water plays a key role in all of them. This means that we need a holistic approach that can help us understand the interlinkages between the sources of these crises and their impacts. This will help decision-makers and practitioners devise solutions that address more than one of these challenges. 

A source-to-sea approach is ideally suited to offer such a holistic perspective, because it highlights the linkages between land, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems. It encourages co-operation between upstream and downstream actors and co-ordination between sectors and countries. It can help investors, corporates, policymakers and communities address water-related challenges such as plastic and chemical pollution.

In the talk show “From words into action: Financing from source to sea” I was joined by Ruth Mathews, senior manager at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and co-ordinator of the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management (S2S Platform), as well as moderator Eric Paglia of KTH Royal Institute of Technology. During the session I connected the source-to-sea approach with value chains. Source-to-sea is a suitable approach to help investors and businesses approach value chains holistically—for climate this is already happening with the focus on scope 3 emissions, and it’s going to come to nature and pollution too. We can see this, for example, in the new EU taxonomy for sustainable activities, which from January 1st 2023 will be expanded to include water and marine resources, transition to a circular economy, pollution and biodiversity. This will force corporates to examine their value chains more closely for water risks—and investors will keep a close eye on that to assess companies’ material risks.

The ocean is often where we see the (downstream) impacts of problems not tackled further upstream, for example in the form of accumulating plastic and chemical pollution. This connection is increasingly being recognised by initiatives such as the UN Global Compact’s Sustainable Ocean Business Action Platform, whose Sustainable Ocean Principles include plastic waste and nutrient run-off from farms and wastewater.

I also highlighted Economist Impact’s Back to Blue programme, which has recently looked at the “invisible wave” of chemical pollution. Its five-step finance wish list for investor-led action on zero marine chemical pollution focuses on the needs for improved ESG guidance, better data, adapting climate-related transition risks to the transition to a zero-pollution ocean, industry-investor collaboration for transition financing, and investing in the burgeoning green-chemistry startup scene.

Momentum is building for the UN Water Conference. Now is the time to feed into the preparatory process, as was repeatedly highlighted by the two co-hosts of the conference, the Netherlands and Tajikistan, represented by special envoys Henk Ovink and Sulton Rahimzoda, respectively. Mr Ovink pointed out that the consultation process is still ongoing, and water stakeholders can send in their requests ahead of a key preparatory meeting at the UN headquarters in New York on October 25th.

There were plenty of opportunities at World Water Week, including during the High-Level Panel convened by SIWI and the Dutch government. Now in its fifth edition, the panel invited leading voices from the global policy community to showcase their vision and commitments towards the road to 2023.

Organisers were keen to point out that World Water Week has come a long way in recent years in terms of becoming more inclusive and diverse. Women now make up 50% of participants, while young people (under 35 years) represent almost 40% of delegates. Voices from minorities have also been integrated better in recent years, with Indigenous communities represented for the first time at this year’s event.

Session themes also captured the need for inclusiveness in the water space, for example in sessions on “Global multi-stakeholder action to accelerate gender equality in water” and a leadership discussion on “Gender parity for water resilience”.

A highlight for young people is the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, with participation by tens of thousands of young water researchers (aged 15-20) from all over the world. This year Annabelle Rayson from Canada was awarded the grand prize for her research on how to treat and prevent harmful algae blooms.

Several sessions, including for example “Building financial sustainability of SMEs to achieve SDG6 after COVID” or “How do we achieve water-wise investments?” highlighted how financial constraints are still one of the most significant obstacles when it comes to solving global water problems.

During the two sessions in which I sat on the panel I emphasised the need for financial innovation. This will be spurred by the need for better corporate and investor reporting on water-related risks and opportunities. The good news is that this is rising up the agenda, with the upcoming extension of the EU taxonomy as well as the growing prominence of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework. Practical tools such as UNEP-WCMC’s Encore platform, which helps investors quantify natural-capital risk across their portfolios, will become increasingly important. In the ocean space we are seeing similar developments, building on the Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI).

There is a lot of innovation that the broader water space can lean on from the progress in blue finance. At the World Ocean Initiative we have been reporting about the rise of blue bonds, for example. These are usually invested in projects that advance ocean health. Prominent examples include the sovereign blue bonds by the Seychelles (2018) and Belize (2021). Major banks have also started to embrace blue bonds. The Nordic Investment Bank issued a blue bond in 2019 aimed at rehabilitating the Baltic Sea. Public banks can play a vital role because they bring much-needed risk-bearing capacity, as highlighted by the Asian Development Bank’s Action Plan for Healthy Oceans and Sustainable Blue Economies and the European Investment Bank’s Blue Sustainable Ocean Strategy.

As discussed above, the water space can learn vital lessons from climate action. Carbon markets have been around for a while, and they have started to be extended to so-called “blue carbon”—ocean ecosystems that store carbon, such as mangrove forests, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows. A good example of this in practice is the Mikoko Pamoja project in Kenya. 

In parallel, there is a growing opportunity in extending the concept of tradable credits for plastics in order to finance solutions to plastic pollution. The idea behind plastic credits is turning waste into value. An example is Project STOP, whose objective is to raise funds for investment in waste infrastructure by selling plastic credits. 

The plastics space has another replicable concept that holds lots of potential for water: Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which aims to make recycled plastic economical by making plastic producers responsible for the end-of-life stage of a product to ensure the material is brought back into the circular economy for plastics. Control-at-source approaches to micropollutants are vital to tackle chemical and plastic pollution, and EPR is one crucial ingredient in financing them.

Although source-to-sea was on the agenda and other key cross-cutting themes were discussed (notably the food-water-energy nexus), the (fresh)water community still struggles to connect with other communities. In particular, the ocean—which accounts for around 97% of the Earth’s water—did not feature prominently on the agenda. 

Several sessions made the point that irrigated agriculture is by far the biggest water user, accounting for around 70% of all freshwater withdrawals globally. Blue foods could be one way of reducing the global food system’s water footprint. 

Sustainable aquaculture is an example of harnessing the ocean’s potential to provide six times more food than it does today. Fish farms have become increasingly efficient and sustainable with the growth of technologies that remotely monitor farm activities—such as metrics relating to fish health, growth rate and water quality—and control feed timings. Innovation in fish feed is also accelerating, from microalgae and insect-based food to genetically modified plants. 

Unintended harmful consequences of the aquaculture boom will have to be mitigated, of course. Fish health, and ocean health more broadly, are a major concern. There is a risk of chemical overuse (antibiotics and microbials) as warmer waters increase the likelihood of disease. 

Of particular interest in the context of water use and the source-to-sea conversation is the rise of seaweed. Kelp can absorb five times more carbon than most land-based plants. Crucially, it also absorbs nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and could therefore be a vital tool in fighting eutrophication in marine ecosystems, which is becoming a global problem as a result of chemical pollution.

Making more of ocean-based climate solutions that harness the potential of the $2.5trn ocean economy will be crucial in unlocking the blue opportunities for the water space more broadly.

The closing panel I participated in ended on an optimistic note: young people have been given a strong voice; the source-to-sea approach is helping to connect water with other important sectors; and water is finally being embraced as a core business issue. This sets the scene nicely for the road to 2023, with World Water Week due to focus on innovation as its core overarching theme next year.

As Mr Ovink, the Dutch water envoy, emphasised on several occasions during the event, solving water challenges requires a willingness to “embrace complexity”. Economist Impact—with its vast experience in water through key initiatives such as the World Ocean Initiative, Back to Blue, the Blue Peace Index and the City Water Optimisation Index—is well placed to make sense of this complexity in order to catalyse progress on the road to the UN Water Conference and beyond.