Unlocking The Potential Of Corporate Funding To Address Water Challenges In Our Communities — Part 3: Promoting Scalable Impact And Innovation
By Patricia Whitby, PhD and Carla De Las Casas, PhD
This three-part series explores how corporations are voluntarily investing in projects that address water risk while demonstrating responsible leadership. Funding from corporate water stewardship (CWS) programs earmarked to address local water challenges has the potential to catalyze innovation in water management. Hence, CWS has important implications for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), utilities and municipalities who can leverage these funds to drive meaningful positive impacts for the benefit of communities and our environment.
Part 1 and Part 2 of this series provide context for corporate water stewardship CWS programs, drivers, and metrics of interest. This final segment discusses how the public sector can get more involved in CWS and presents opportunities for win-win partnerships that drive strategic innovation.
The Role Of The Public Sector In Addressing Water Challenges
Water utilities, community-based organizations, water user associations, and other local entities play crucial roles in managing water resources effectively for the benefit of all users. Management of water infrastructure by public entities offers numerous advantages, including leveraging local knowledge, promoting sustainability, fostering ownership, reducing costs, enhancing social cohesion, and adapting to changing conditions. These public entities are already planning and implementing the kinds of projects that corporate water stewardship (CWS) programs are interested in funding. The challenge lies in finding the right project at the right scale to attract the right corporate funder.
Promoting Innovation At Scale
Communities today face challenges in adapting to the impacts of climate change, such as altered precipitation patterns, increased frequency of extreme weather events, or changing hydrological cycles. To address these challenges, utilities are forced to consider innovative solutions for long-term resilience. Many of these solutions are massive undertakings and require access to large funding mechanisms.
A corporation with a global footprint may have a multi-million-dollar annual budget to invest in water replenishment projects across all the regions where they operate but compared to the multi-billion-dollar federal grants and loans — such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act — CWS investments are not a significant funding stream for large water infrastructure projects. Therefore, it is important to match CWS funding to the appropriate project scale. CWS funding can be a good fit for pilots or demonstration scale projects associated with a new process, technology, or management solution, which are often required in early stages of federally funded projects.
Demonstration-scale projects offer numerous benefits that make them appealing to CWS investments. For example, quantitative metrics collected as part of the demonstration program provide investors with accurate impact metrics. Utilities and local governments are also trustworthy partners invested in advancing projects that are locally relevant and in the best interest of their communities. Furthermore, demonstration projects are designed to have shorter implementation timelines and be the first of many, with scalability built into the demonstration test. Finally, once a demonstration project is completed with benefits validated, federal funding for large-scale adoption becomes more feasible and creates an enabling environment that can lead to greater benefits for all stakeholders in terms of improved community resilience.
Untapped Benefits For Utilities
From a utility’s perspective, communities may not have access to advanced technologies or may face challenges in adopting and maintaining modern water management tools. This hinders their capacity to adapt to changing conditions within a reasonable timeline. CWS funding for innovative, early-stage projects can be an important driver to jumpstart capacity-building efforts. Thus, CWS investments can act as a financial incentive. In combination with supportive policies and inclusive decision-making processes, funding availability can make the difference between a utility prioritizing short-term approaches (e.g., digging a deeper well in a declining aquifer) versus taking a longer-term perspective (e.g., implementing an aquifer recharge program).
Another common challenge is the need for permitting with local, regional, and federal agencies, which can add uncertainty to project timelines. Interest and engagement from corporations may help expedite the permitting pathway, particularly for smaller pilot projects.
Ultimately, leveraging CWS funding to activate these early stage or demonstration projects maximizes the benefits to all stakeholders. Utilities benefit by collaborating with the private sector in their community, which is often a large water user. The funding allows the utility to implement innovation faster, as CWS funding is often more quickly deployed than other types of grants. Collaboration with the private sector can also help attract other funding sources, as this type of engagement validates innovation and interest in scaling the right solutions.
Conclusion
As the world focuses on tackling climate change, environments that allow for innovation and scaling become essential. The community-centered approach of CWS — matching private sector funding to public water projects — represents an effective way to identify, fund, execute, and replicate impactful, innovative projects.
Although public utility-led infrastructure projects boast many of the key attributes that CWS programs are seeking, the public sector has had very little involvement in these programs to date. Developing relationships between the private sector and public utilities will require educating both parties on each other’s respective drivers and expectations. Thus, efforts to facilitate this relationship-building, either through consultants or other coordinating partners, will be critical to the success of CWS initiatives. These relationships represent exciting new pathways to scalable innovations in climate resiliency.
About The Authors
Dr. Patricia Whitby is Brown and Caldwell’s Water Stewardship Program Implementation Lead based in Colorado. In this role she supports clients in developing the framework to deliver on water commitments. This includes resources and processes designed to capture and report the right metrics for each client's program.
Dr. Carla De Las Casas leads Brown and Caldwell’s Water Stewardship team. She is passionate about supporting clients in developing and executing their water stewardship strategies to positively impact our watersheds and create thriving communities. Identifying opportunities for win-win collaboration between public and private sectors to address our shared water challenges and manage risks is a major area of focus of Brown and Caldwell’s Water Stewardship team.
Headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, Brown and Caldwell is a full-service environmental engineering and construction services firm with 52 offices and over 1,900 professionals across North America and the Pacific. For more than 75 years, our creative solutions have helped municipalities, private industry, and government agencies successfully overcome their most challenging water and environmental obstacles. As an employee-owned company, Brown and Caldwell is passionate about exceeding our clients’ expectations and making a difference for our employees, our communities, and our environment. For more information, visit https://brownandcaldwell.com.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Ted Douglass (Impact Sustainability, LLC) for his valuable contributions to this article.