Neville Isdell

“Water is the new carbon.” – Carter Roberts, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund-US

I was standing next to Carter Roberts in Beijing when he said those words, and I could not agree more. While society is starting to address the real problems of climate change, we have a great deal of work to do to address our planet’s water challenges.  

Today, more than one billion people do not have access to safe water. This lack of access is further complicated by decreasing reliability of water supply, floods and droughts.
 
To make a difference on this global challenge, I believe that governments, civil society and businesses must work together as never before. For business leaders in particular, I believe we need to speak up, stand up, and scale up our efforts on water sustainability.

Why must business play a role? Businesses of every size and from every industry rely on water. For some, like my company, water is a main ingredient. For other companies, water is a key part of the production process or the supply chain. 

But water is not just important to our businesses. It is critical to the communities we serve. We cannot have a sustainable business unless the communities we serve are sustainable themselves.

For companies looking to be part of the solution, the CEO Water Mandate offers a roadmap for sustainability. All that it requires is a commitment to engage in addressing the water challenges we all face today. The mandate recognizes that companies have varying levels of knowledge and engagement on water resource management, but it shares some tangible ways we can all make a difference.

It is estimated that by 2025, two-thirds of the global population will face severe and chronic water shortages. The truth is that no one company, government or NGO can solve these problems alone. We must work together, and that is one of the reasons why Coca-Cola joined the UN Global Compact. In July 2007, I signed the Compact’s CEO Water Mandate to help improve our work within Coca-Cola and to show our support for business scaling up collective actions to achieve global water sustainability.

About the Mandate
 
The CEO Water Mandate recognizes that the private sector has an important role to play in water stewardship, and it is designed to spark private sector engagement in helping to address the water challenges facing our planet. The mandate focuses on six areas: direct operations, supply chain and watershed management, collective action, public policy, community engagement, and transparency. 

It asks companies to begin examining their operations, to encourage better water practices throughout the supply chain, and to work with governments, civil society organizations, and communities to make progress.

The Mandate recognizes that different companies are starting at different points and face different challenges and timeframes. The important thing is to get started today, and the CEO Water Mandate shows companies how to do just that.

Coca-Cola’s Journey
For us at The Coca-Cola Company, the CEO Water Mandate is a natural extension of the work we are already doing on water stewardship. We recognize that communities must be sustainable if they are to thrive and support our customers, employees and business. 

From this understanding, we have set a number of goals.  We are working to grow our business without increasing any additional carbon to the atmosphere. We are working to recycle or reuse 100 percent of our PET plastic bottles, not only in North America, but around the world. 

We have also set goals related to water. In June, I announced an aspirational goal to replace every drop of water The Coca-Cola Company uses in our products and in their production.  We are working with the World Wildlife Fund to help make progress on that goal by:

• reducing our demand by focusing on water efficiency in our operations,
• recycling the water we use in our manufacturing processes so it can be safely returned to the environment, and
• replenishing the supply of water by supporting healthy watersheds and sustainable community water programs. 

In all, we are part of more than 70 community water initiatives in 40 countries. We are also a founding partner in the Global Water Challenge, a diverse group of governments, organizations, businesses and individuals all focused on working together to scale up solutions to safe drinking water. We are making progress, but we have a long way to go. I am writing this column with the hope that other companies will begin making a similar journey.

Steps You Can Take
So how can you get started? First, start within your company and look for ways to reduce your water use. Next, explore ways to recycle the water you do use. Ensure that any water you return to the environment is treated. Then look beyond your company’s four walls for ways to replenish the supply of water in the broader watersheds we all share.

The next step is to work through your entire supply chain. Ask suppliers to measure their impact on our water resources. Eventually, you can measure your progress on water goals as you measure other business and productivity goals.

When society faces global challenges like water scarcity, we all need to come together to leverage our individual efforts.  Business leaders have a critical role to play. Supporting the communities we serve is not just enlightened self-interest, it is quite literally self-interest. The CEO Water Mandate provides a path forward to take collective action on a global scale. I invite you to learn more about the CEO Water Mandate at: http://www.unglobalcompact.org/Issues/Environment/Water_sustainability/index.html