GWS 2026: Engaging Industrial Water Users with the UN Water Agenda

Workshop Summary 

 Global Water Intelligence — Global Water Summit  •  Day 0  •  ~90 minutes  •  Held under the Chatham House Rule 

1. PURPOSE & CONTEXT 

The session brought together industrial water users, UN system representatives, and water stewardship practitioners to explore the role of the private sector in the UN water agenda. It was convened ahead of the third UN Water Conference in 50 years — scheduled for December in Abu Dhabi — a rare and significant moment for shaping global water governance. 

The session was co-organised by a coalition of organisations working at the interface of the private sector and the policy world, including the CEO Water Mandate, CDP, EDRA, Aquafed, and others. It drew on interim results of an active multi-organisation survey on private sector engagement with the UN on water. 

Unlike climate and biodiversity, there is no annual "water COP" and none are likely in the short or medium term. This makes the December conference — only the third in 50 years — a critical window of opportunity. 

Survey Highlights (interim results, 440+ responses) 

• Physical water risk ranked as the top concern among industrial respondents — 100% cited it as either "of some concern" or "of major concern" 

• This was followed by reputational and licence-to-operate issues in water-stressed areas, growing competition for water resources, and supply chain risk 

• Almost half of all respondents — and a majority of industrial water users — say they have never engaged with the UN in any capacity 

• Two thirds of companies want an industry voice at the December UN Water Conference 

• Interest in ongoing engagement spans: involvement in technical working groups, collaboration on country-level pilots, and indirect engagement through industry associations 

Central takeaway: there is real appetite for engagement among industrial water users with the UN, but there is no formal seat at the table. Clarity is needed on the mechanisms and opportunities for engagement. 

2. UNDERSTANDING THE UN SYSTEM 

A representative from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) offered an honest overview of the UN system — acknowledging its limitations while explaining the structural reasons behind them. 

What UN Water Is (and Isn't) 

UN Water is not an agency in the way people often imagine. It does not have large-scale field programmes or many country offices. It is a coordination mechanism — a table around which 30 UN entities and partners sit, each with their own budgets, mandates, operating structures, and priorities. In essence, UN Water does not command the UN system, but it convenes it. Critically, it gives the world a shared evidence base — including the SDG 6 monitoring architecture, the World Water Development Report, and the UN Water Conference — and an opportunity for interaction. 

Why Engagement Is Sometimes Difficult 

• No single front door: who you engage depends entirely on the mandate of the specific UN entity 

• Fundamentally different operating cultures: the private sector is built with speed; the UN is optimised for legitimacy — one moves fast because markets demand it, the other moves carefully because its clients are governments, and governments require consensus 

• Structural constraints: the UN cannot quickly sign contracts, cannot accept funding from just anybody, and engaging in partnerships requires heavy due diligence 

• Accountability gaps on both sides: the private sector may struggle to translate ambition to measurable implementation; the UN can struggle to translate global priorities into investable opportunities. As one speaker put it directly: "Commitments are easy to announce, hard to measure, and even harder to validate" 

Recommendation: Engage with the UN system strategically — identify the right agency and understand its mandate. UNIDO, for example, exists specifically to work with industry and speaks the language of circular economy, resource efficiency, supply chains, water reuse, and investment readiness. 

The UN as a "Parliament of Countries" 

The session heard from the former Dutch Special Envoy for Water who co-hosted the 2023 UN Water Conference. He underscored that the UN is a system where member states come together — a parliament of countries — and that countries cannot decide on anything without understanding the needs, ambitions, and capacities of the private sector and civil society. 

He noted that while the 2023 conference generated over 800 commitments from around the world, the follow-up part was failing: the coalitions that are there are not supported, the commitments that are there are not validated, and the outcome of the conference is still up in the air. The upcoming December 2026 conference (Abu Dhabi), and further conferences in 2028 (Tajikistan), offer a chance to do better — particularly as the world moves toward defining the post-2030 development agenda beyond the SDGs. 

He also noted a structural gap: there is no level playing field on water, there is no market understanding of water, and there is no set of agreements for water within or across governments comparable to those that exist for climate, energy, or food. 

3. INDUSTRY PANEL: WATER RISKS & NEEDS 

Five major industrial water users — spanning food and beverage, luxury goods and apparel, extractives, life sciences/agriculture, and dairy/food — shared how water risk is informing their decision-making and where current global frameworks fall short. This session was held under the Chatham House Rule; perspectives are summarised without attribution. 

How Water Risk Shows Up for Industry 

• Physical water availability and security: inability to operate without water in increasingly water-scarce geographies 

• Competition and conflict: potential for water competition to undermine both operational and social licence to operate 

• Supply chain disruption: upstream risk is particularly acute, with agriculture representing approximately 70% of global fresh water consumption — and largely beyond direct corporate control 

• Regulatory and reputational risk: stakeholder expectations have moved beyond efficiency to responsible use and demonstrable local impact 

• Climate-driven variability: shifts in the absolute amount, seasonality, and intensity of water availability 

Key framing: Risks and solutions are basin-based, but the challenge is how to translate local integration into a meaningful global framework. 

Gaps in Current Global Frameworks 

• Frameworks are too siloed — they push companies to be linear, do it alone, and self-funded, with specific metrics in isolation. As one panellist put it: today, frameworks are keeping everyone working from the sidelines 

• Nature-based solutions and regenerative agriculture offer co-benefits (water retention, soil health, biodiversity) that current frameworks cannot measure or incentivise — so efforts remain fragmented and small in scale; the co-benefits need to be demonstrable 

• Company-level replenishment targets — even ambitious ones — do not move the needle at watershed scale. Reaching a replenishment target prompts the question: did you actually move the needle? 

• There are no river basin level targets: companies have their own targets, counting cubic metres, but as one panellist framed it starkly: "I reduce a m³, but so what?" — targets must include agriculture and be basin-wide to be meaningful 

• Transboundary challenges remain largely unaddressed: basin management can be derailed by unilateral national decisions without coordinated governance 

• SMEs (PMEs) remain largely unreached: they can often estimate their impact but cannot measure it, and lack the motivation, tools, or financial mechanisms to engage — yet they make up the bulk of water use 

What Industry Wants from the UN 

• Support for implementation at basin level: guidance and frameworks for collective action that unify governments, companies, civil society, and local actors — the UN can convene basin-level stakeholders across business, government, and local communities in a way that companies individually cannot 

• The UN as the grout between the tiles: companies do not have legitimacy to take on a civil society approach on their own. The UN can bridge the platforms of private sector, agriculture, municipalities, and others — coordinating actors who each have a piece of the solution but no single mechanism to connect them 

• Prioritisation: a limited number of high-impact water topics to focus global action, rather than continued fragmentation 

• Enabling coordinated action — coming from ambition to execution, not simply adding more targets 

• Recognition that businesses need the UN involved, particularly in learning from the climate space: businesses were not meaningfully included until COP26, and the same shift is needed in water 

4. BREAKOUT DISCUSSIONS 

Participants self-organised into mixed-industry groups to address two questions: (1) What are the top strategic water issues that require greater UN focus? and (2) How would you like to engage with the UN on water? Groups included representatives from textiles, energy, automotive, building materials, and food and beverage. The following reflects themes from the readouts; no comments are attributed to individuals or organisations. 

Q1: Top Strategic Water Issues for UN Focus 

Basin-Level Data & Science 

• Companies across sectors are unable to set meaningful targets without a shared, reliable baseline understanding of conditions in the basins where they operate 

• Existing tools (e.g. WRI Aqueduct, WWF Water Risk Filter) are widely used but do not provide the local-level actor mapping or data richness needed for project development 

• Participants called for a shared data catalog at basin level: a common understanding of water stress, users, and governance actors — ideally co-developed with local governments and academia 

• The textiles and leather sector raised a particularly acute version of this challenge: supply chains often do not know where their raw material commodities are ultimately sourced, making basin-level risk assessment extremely difficult 

Basin Platforms & Collective Action Infrastructure 

• There is a need for a basin platform for every major hotspot — a space where the major actors can feed in information and coordinate when needed 

• Such platforms must be multi-stakeholder: government, industry, agriculture, local communities, and civil society — no single actor, including local government, has the capacity to convene this alone 

• The Water Resilience Coalition (a CEO Water Mandate initiative) was cited as a working example of basin-level public-private collaboration that could be scaled 

• Setting basin-level targets — as distinct from individual company targets — was seen as fundamental, and as something no single actor can define unilaterally 

Science-Based Targets & a Common Language 

• Unlike climate, there is no agreed end state for water — no equivalent of net zero — making it difficult to align corporate strategy with global ambition 

• Participants pointed to the Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) water framework as a promising direction, but noted it is currently complex and not widely followed 

• The suggestion: take what works from SBTI for carbon, simplify it for water — a common scientific understanding of water stress that companies can actually use to set targets and compare progress 

• A common language for water accounting was identified as a prerequisite: terms like "water consumption" do not mean the same thing across sectors or companies 

SME Engagement & the Human Rights Dimension 

• Most water is used by SMEs — small farms, small industrial facilities — yet current frameworks largely do not reach them. A key barrier: SMEs can often estimate their water impact but cannot measure it, and without measurement there is no mechanism for motivation, finance, or accountability 

• Participants called for mechanisms to unlock engagement from millions of SMEs: financial incentives, simplified tools, and platforms to showcase good examples 

• The human right to water was named explicitly: when industry competes for water in communities that lack access, it competes with the human right. This is not only a risk — it is a moral reality that needs to be built into business cases and board-level narratives 

• In textiles specifically, the workforce dimension was raised: the industry's workforce is predominantly women, and water insecurity at the community level directly threatens workforce availability and stability 

Q2: How Industry Wants to Engage with the UN 

• Indirect engagement through industry associations and multi-stakeholder platforms — rather than expecting direct bilateral engagement with UN agencies 

• Involvement in technical working groups, particularly on data standards, science-based targets, and basin-level frameworks 

• Country-level collaboration: the suggestion was raised that UN agencies (e.g. UNDP) could do more to facilitate interaction between corporates and implementing partners in the countries that need it most 

• The UN as a platform for enhanced collective action — something the UN is not heavily involved in yet, but could be, particularly at the sectoral and basin levels 

• Better integration of the private sector into national water strategies and national adaptation plans, with the UN supporting countries to incentivise water stewardship and IWRM 

• Engagement was described not as direct lobbying, but as pressure — the convening of a community that orients and directs, in the same way that collective mobilisation around climate shaped the COP process 

5. CLOSING REFLECTIONS 

Synthesising remarks from the CEO Water Mandate and UNIDO highlighted the following threads running across the session: 

• Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM): the UN has a significant role to play in building capacity at national and sub-national levels to implement IWRM — this is complex, but foundational 

• Basin-scale frameworks and transboundary management: companies need basin-level frameworks that unify actors across sectors and jurisdictions, with the UN's convening power bringing nation states into joint long-term goal setting 

• Stability and certainty: there is a strong business need for consistent, long-term policy goals — these help companies align investments and strategies to what the world actually needs 

• The 100 Basins Initiative (launched at the 2023 UN Water Conference) was highlighted as an active model, with basin collaboratives currently underway in approximately 24–25 of those basins 

• Finance: companies cannot finance all of the required changes alone — but it is also critical that donors understand the private sector is not just a vehicle for blended finance; private sector also needs access to finance to make these changes 

• Nature-based solutions and regenerative agriculture: strong interest across sectors, but a more solid business case is needed to demonstrate that these approaches work at scale 

• Water stewardship was framed as a user-centred response to the shortcomings of integrated water resource management — and the pathway to making it meaningful runs through stronger links between voluntary commitments, ISO-level standards, and basin-level accountability 

Closing provocation from a panellist: Within climate, we know the end state is net zero. Do we have an end state for water? Setting science-based targets at the basin level may be the most important near-term challenge for the sector — and an area where the UN can play a defining role. 

6. NEXT STEPS 

Complete the private sector water survey (link/QR code circulated by the organising coalition). Results will directly inform the December conference agenda.	All participants
Participate in stepping stone events between now and December. The organising coalition will circulate details of preparatory events leading up to the Abu Dhabi conference.	All participants
Identify the most relevant UN agency for your organisation's engagement and initiate contact with specificity: a measurable target, a clear financing structure, a pilotable pathway. UNIDO is a particularly relevant entry point for industrial sectors.	Companies
Explore joining the CEO Water Mandate / UN Global Compact corporate commitment platform, including engagement with the Water Resilience Coalition and the 100 Basins Initiative for basin-level action.	Companies
Build the business case for basin-level targets and collective action. Identify shared basins among peers and begin mapping what multi-stakeholder coordination would require — this is the infrastructure the December conference should help legitimise.	Companies / Industry taskforces
Engage government counterparts in member states to channel private sector priorities through national delegations to the UN — the most structurally reliable route for private sector input into the intergovernmental process.	Companies / Associations
Assess where supply chain visibility gaps are blocking basin-level engagement (particularly relevant for textiles, leather, and agricultural commodity users) and prioritise data initiatives that close these gaps.	Sector programmes / Taskforces

This summary was prepared from the session transcript. The session was held under the Chatham House Rule: information and views expressed are reflected without attribution to individuals or organisations. Quotes reproduced in this document are editorial characterisations of views expressed, not verbatim attributions.