This report benchmarks companies taking a landscape-scale approach to water risk – looking beyond direct operations to the larger watershed context. Business leaders from Coca-Cola to SABMiller to Sony are experimenting with natural infrastructure investments that address many of the operational risks at the top of their lists – including supply disruptions and emerging regulations – while saving money, increasing resilience to climate and natural disaster shocks, and improving relations with local communities. These efforts are known as investments in watershed services (“IWS”).
This executive summary is developed specifically for a business audience, building upon data and analysis first presented in a more comprehensive report from Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace on the topic of watershed investments – Charting New Waters: State of Watershed Payments 2012. In Charting New Waters, we track the size, scope, and outlook for investments in watershed services and in the ecological infrastructure from which they flow.
