Fueling Growth

For a company that needs water for manufacturing, in its supply chain, or even for product use, a lack of access to water may jeopardize its growth. The risks point to a need to align water stewardship and business growth strategies, and to go beyond an efficiency focus.

This points to a key question: How do companies with ambitious global growth strategies secure the water they need to fuel business growth in a world where simply paying more for water will not work?

The answer resides in why and how companies align their water stewardship strategies to support their business growth strategies. This alignment is built upon two key actions. First, companies that synchronize water stewardship strategy with growth strategy can benefit from considering and quantifying water’s full business value, moving beyond the price of water to take into account water’s various impacts on operations, value chain, brand, and growth prospects. Second, companies that depend on water would also benefit from proactively leading collective action initiatives with stakeholders across their value chain within the watersheds in which they operate. Actions in these two areas go well beyond most companies’ current thinking on water management, which focuses primarily on water efficiency and reuse and recycling within their operations.