Water is a crucial ingredient for growing fruits, vegetables and other crops, with around 70% of global freshwater used for agriculture. With changes in climate, sustainably managing water will be essential to ensuring continued crop production.
Many strategies focus on site-level water management, but addressing all of the sector’s water risks, from water scarcity impacting crop yields to a lack of safe water for workers, requires us to think beyond the fenceline. It requires an understanding of how water impacts are felt across complex agricultural supply chains.
The Alliance for Water Stewardship provides a systematic and auditable approach to guide your water stewardship journey, along with the tools, expertise and helping hands needed to implement the AWS Standard across value chains.
Global climate change, growing economies and changing lifestyles are putting increasing pressure on the earth’s limited freshwater resources. Water stewardship is a holistic approach for using and protecting the water we all depend on.
Our approach to water stewardship not only ensures that the most important water risks are managed but also provides a mechanism to inspire conversations and action among those entities sharing water resources. The result: stronger stakeholder relationships and an increase in a community’s collective resilience.
The Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) exists to tackle the urgent global challenges driven by water insecurity. Our mission is to ignite and nurture global and local leadership in credible water stewardship that recognises and secures freshwater’s social, cultural, environmental and economic value.
Learn more about how we are accelarating our impact by reading our 2022-2030 strategy.
AWS and its members support the adoption and promotion of the AWS Standard. Our collaborative network works hand-in-hand towards the same goals: using water stewardship to protect the shared water resources we all rely on.
We support action on two levels:
Our strength lies in the diversity of experience that AWS Members bring with them. AWS Members tell us that the collaborative, multistakeholder nature of our organisation gives them confidence that they are doing the right thing. It allows them to challenge each other and the system, to respond to water challenges in a transparent, equitable and sustainable way. AWS Members also play a pivotal role in growing and strengthening the water stewardship community.
AWS Member organisations have unlimited access to the AWS Tools Hub. The site is home to a variety of water stewardship resources to help you along your water stewardship journey, including:
The AWS Tools Hub is now also available in Spanish!
Read our case studies highlighting learnings on implementing water stewardship in the agriculture sector:
Agrícola Chapi is an agricultural company in Peru which exports fresh produce such as asparagus, grapes and avocados to European, North American, Asian, and Australian markets. Despite unforeseen challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Agrícola Chapi received AWS core certification in 2022. This case study demonstrates how agricultural companies can create a pathway to water stewardship and makes contributions to the understanding of water stewardship in Latin America.
We invite committed companies working in agricultural and agricultural supply chains, NGOs and regional experts to apply to join our Community of Practice (Cop) on Agricultural Supply Chains. Participants will:
Are you interested in joining our next meeting? Apply to join today!
The AWS Impact Accelerator is a collaborative, location-based approach to water stewardship. It was developed to give businesses working in water-stressed regions an opportunity to work together to find solutions to shared challenges in a cost-effective, scalable and replicable way.
AWS is currently running and scoping AWS Collective Action Accelerators across the globe.
AWS Standard certification is confirmation of having met best practice for responsible water stewardship. It enables sites to make credible claims about their water stewardship performance and benefits may include increased investor confidence, improved brand perception and strengthened customer relationships.
A company can implement the AWS Standard across its single, group or multi-site operations.
