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Steps 5
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Lecture1.1
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Lecture1.2
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Lecture1.3
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Lecture1.4
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Lecture1.5
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Promote the CEO Water Mandate to Foster Water Stewardship Commitments
Introduction
Drive water stewardship around the world by encouraging companies to endorse the CEO Water Mandate!
Since 2008, the CEO Water Mandate has served as the UN Global Compact’s initiative to mobilize business leaders and learners to address the world’s water challenges. The Mandate was created out of the acknowledgement that global water challenges create risk for a wide range of industry sectors, the public sector, local communities, and ecosystems alike. Thus, cross-sectoral collaboration on shared water goals is the most effective path to more sustainable water management. The private sector can be a valuable and even essential partner in this effort.
While the Mandate is now endorsed by over 170 of the world’s largest and most influential businesses, including BHP, Coca-Cola, Nike, PepsiCo, Unilever, and many others, it has significant room for garnering commitments from more companies, especially regional companies and SMEs. True progress will only occur when water stewardship is a mainstream practice for companies, despite their size, experience, and budget.
By encouraging companies in their networks to commit to the CEO Water Mandate, business networks can drive action, accountability, and transparency in their own locales and help bring water stewardship to the next tier of companies.
Why should companies endorse the Mandate?
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Demonstrate stewardship commitment to internal and external stakeholders
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Access dozens of resources that help build stewardship capacity
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Connect to a network of companies and learn from their experiences
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Attend in-person and online events that help elucidate key stewardship best practices
Commitments
At its core the CEO Water Mandate is a commitment platform. It spurs action by calling on companies to commit to action – and continuously report on progress – regarding it’s six commitment areas:
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Direct Operations
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Supply Chain & Watershed Management
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Collective Action
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Public Policy
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Community Engagement
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Transparency
For more on the six commitment areas, see: https://ceowatermandate.org/about/the-six-commitment-areas/
Committing to the Mandate is an aspirational pledge. It does not suggest that companies are already implementing all helpful stewardship activities. By endorsing the Mandate, companies commit to continuous improvement in these six core areas – regardless of their current performance. They also commit to submitting a publicly-available CEO Water Mandate Communication on Progress report on an annual basis to share their progress, challenges, and future plans.
To commit to the Mandate, companies must: 1) be UN Global Compact signatories and 2) send a letter of commitment to the Mandate Secretariat, signed by an executive-level representative.
Implementation
Networks can best promote and raises awareness around stewardship and the Mandate by convening in-person events and webinars that espouse core water stewardship principles. In doing so, they can help companies understand the business case for action while connecting them to helpful frameworks and resources for taking action. Networks can use the Water Stewardship 101 PowerPoint presentation as the basis of such workshops.
Networks can also help raise awareness of the stewardship and the Mandate by:
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Sharing the Mandate website with members
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Encouraging companies to sign up for the Mandate’s newsletter
Foster Commitment
Share your network’s commitments to the CEO Water Mandate with other networks and via Twitter using @H2O_stewards.
Connect interested companies to the Mandate Secretariat for an informational call. Translate the Mandate website, Mandate core document, and Water Action Hub into their language. Contact Peter Schulte (pschulte@pacinst.org) for more details.