Water Futures Mobilizing Multi Stakeholder Action for Resilience 2025

Shaping a systems approach2 Water is increasingly at the centre of the global agenda, especially with drought, flooding and severe pollution becoming more prevalent and visible.53 In recent years, the international community has responded by creating new platforms for visibility and discussion, such as the recent UN Water Conference in 2023, and water has now become a key topic at UN climate COP conferences. Moreover, recent milestone publications – such as WWF’s The High Cost of Cheap Water,54 CDP’s Stewardship at the Source,55 and, crucially, GCEW’s report The Economics of Water: Valuing the Hydrological Cycle as a Global Common Good 56 – have highlighted the critical role of water in our economies and prosperity. However, while the critical role of the water cycle in our economies is globally recognized as a priority for most sectors of the economy, the majority of private sector actors struggle to identify tangible entry points for taking effective action to build water resilience, beyond pilot projects. This chapter summarizes the key themes and opportunities identified by Forum partners during the consultation process, which have been synthesized into two focus areas for building water resilience at different scales: 1. Mainstream circular water 2. Rethink water use and restore ecosystems A key finding from the consultation was that actions by private sector actors and public-private collaborations often remain limited to piecemeal measures that are difficult to scale-up. While this approach has led to transformative ideas, partners overwhelmingly expressed the need for more actionable frameworks that integrate a systemic view to enable private sector action at scale. The consultation also revealed that the opportunity areas identified by partners tend to focus on specific assets and particular scales. However, synergies between assets, the impact of their investments on the hydrological cycle, as well as the broader enabling environment needed for large-scale or system-level action, remain largely unexplored by the private sector. In this context, it is essential to consider both small-scale actions at the local level (e.g. farms, households, neighbourhoods) and large-scale actions (e.g. national, subnational, basin-level) as opportunity areas simultaneously. A multi-scale perspective can ensure that specific interventions account for their impact on the broader system while enabling policies and collaborative environments to lay the foundation for rapidly scalable and basin-level action. Adopting this multi-scale perspective can be a useful step towards a more systems-based approach to collective water action. This report proposes that, to enable collective action from the private sector and multi-stakeholder partnerships, actors need to explore and understand the impact of interventions both in the immediate context and at a larger scale, including the entire hydrological cycle (see Figure 3). These two nested and interrelated scales represent critical opportunity areas where resilience can be strengthened through private sector actions, targeted investments and collaborative efforts among diverse stakeholders. Possibilities for private sector and multi-stakeholder action are present – and needed – at multiple scales. Some opportunities call for localized, agile interventions where actors can coordinate effectively, while others necessitate broader, systemic approaches that engage a wide range of partners.A multi-scale perspective can ensure that enabling policies and collaborative environments lay the foundation for scalable, basin-level action. To enable collective action from the private sector and multi- stakeholder partnerships, actors need to explore and understand the impact of interventions both in the immediate context and at a larger scale, including the entire hydrological cycle. Water Futures: Mobilizing Multi-Stakeholder Action for Resilience 11