BSR Insight Articles About Water

Social Impact Assessments Help Companies Manage Risks and Opportunities

Alison Colwell, Associate Director, Advisory Services

With growing stakeholder expectations and increasingly complex operating environments, leading companies recognize the need for a more comprehensive approach to understanding and managing project risks and opportunities that moves beyond regulatory requirements. Social impact assessments (SIA)—the process of analyzing, monitoring, and managing social issues such as resettlement and access to water—can help companies reduce risks, enhance operational decision-making, improve stakeholder relations, maximize community benefits, and secure a company’s license to operate. Read more →

Posted: June 28, 2011 | Topics: Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Energy, Human Rights, Mining, Supply Chain, Water

The Human Face of Water-Related Risk Assessments

Linda Hwang, Former Manager, Research

At the CEO Water Mandate meeting in Copenhagen last week—which focused on corporate water disclosure—one participant reminded us of the connections between water, healthy populations, and corporate performance. Despite the growing number of  tools to help investors and companies assess water-related risks, companies will miss a critical factor when evaluating their long-term risks if the tools do not link physical-, regulatory-, and reputational-risk frameworks to people’s ability to participate in the growth of healthy economies. Read more →

Posted: May 24, 2011 | Topics: Community Engagement & Development, Economic Development, Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Strategy & Integration, Supply Chain, Water

Water as an Unequal Human Right

A recent posting on Visualizing.org—a creative community that provides graphical representations of data on complex issues—looks at the differences in how "consuming" countries and developing countries use water and are affected by the lack of clean water. The visual representation—created by Tuduyen Nguyen and Cameron Reynolds-Flatt—was created to encourage people to conserve water resources by pointing out facts such as the number of bottles of water consumed each year in the United States and the percentage of the world’s population that lives without basic sanitation. Read more →

Posted: May 17, 2011 | Topics: Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, Environment, Water

Coca-Cola Announces US$6 Million Investment in Clean Water Programs

According to the World Health Organization, African women and children spend up to 40 billion hours per year collecting water. Because they often travel long distances to retrieve clean water, women frequently resort to using unsafe water sources, putting themselves and their families at risk of life-threatening diseases. Read more →

Posted: April 5, 2011 | Topics: Community Engagement & Development, Water, Women & Sustainability

Understanding and Managing Water-Related Risks

Linda Hwang, Former Manager, Research

Last week, visualizing.org and Circle of Blue opened their World Water Day data visualization challenge, calling on designers and data experts to create visualizations on the topic of urban water issues. The challenge highlights the difficulty shared by many sectors in presenting the complexity of water issues in simple, easy-to-understand ways. For companies, the challenge is compounded by the need to present information on different types of water-related risks for multiple locations and to a variety of audiences. Read more →

Posted: March 1, 2011 | Topics: Environment, Water