Standards for the Water Industry

Water stewardship and climate resilience in a broader context

The SCS Water Stewardship and Resiliency (WSR) Certification was developed to help private sector organisations of all sizes, including small, medium enterprises (SME's), demonstrate leadership and commitment to responsible water use. This can be achieved through measuring baseline water performance, setting measurable, local and contextually relevant targets, demonstrating water stewardship and resiliency practices, and monitoring progress year over year.

Launched in June 2024, the SCS Water Stewardship and Resiliency (WSR) Certification programme offers a fresh approach by focusing on transparency, innovation, and climate adaptation, going beyond mandatory reporting.

For a lot of organisations, water is a newer area for them, and sustainability leaders need a clear roadmap for water stewardship and resiliency

Climate adaptation, water resilience and water management were priorities when developing the SCS WSR certification in correlation with an organisation's sustainability journey in the twenty-first century. As such, SCS integrated circular economy concepts and nature-based solutions more prominently.

The standard assesses risk, impact, and opportunities through water metrics (water usage, consumption, discharge, quality, water balance) and place-based data to determine relevant and accessible reductions in water usage.

SCS WSR certification offers companies a fresh look at a specific site's risk profile in connection with their impact and offers channels for improvement in categories such as biodiversity, water circularity, nature-based solutions, innovative technologies and community engagement. Certification helps companies raise awareness of their water stewardship achievements with site-specific certification and transparent on-product claims.

Organisations are encouraged to create opportunities for strategic shifts in operations and finance to adapt to both changing water conditions and climatic changes.

Water standard: a natural progression for SCS

SCS began in December 1984, performing testing and assurance services in the fresh produce industry in California. In the past 40 years, SCS has expanded to provide a range of more than 130 environmental sustainability and social impact programmes across global industries.

Kevin Warner, told Aquatech Online: "As a sustainability-focused company, we've worked in many industries that are adjacent to water and pretty clearly, water is a critical subject matter area for the future. We knew we wanted to expand our role in water stewardship. It wasn't a question of 'do we do it?' It was 'how do we do it effectively' and how ready is the market for a new water certification programme?"

We knew we wanted to expand our role in water stewardship. It wasn't a question of 'do we do it?' It was 'how do we do it effectively'

He added: "For a lot of organisations, water is a newer area for them, and sustainability leaders need a clear roadmap for water stewardship and resiliency."

As a leader in all thing's sustainability for decades, SCS Standards, a subsidiary of SCS Global Services, began to regularly field questions about developing a water standard.

Lauren Enright told Aquatech Online: "SCS was well placed in the market to develop the SCS Water Stewardship and Resiliency Standard in line with new EU regulations and asks from current clients. SCS has a long track record of addressing gaps in the market and delivering standards to address those gaps. At the end of the day, we are trying to meet the need to raise water stewardship up."

Practical implementation and clear pathways

SCS included conformance language in the standard to recognise other third-party certification standards, so if an organisation is certified to ISO 14001, the number of indicators would be reduced to meet the certification criteria to the SCS Water Standard.

Lauren Enright: "The recent feedback we received from clients, auditors, and consultants has been extremely positive pointing to how well placed we are in the market aligning with regulations, innovation, and clear risk of water stressed regions."

She continued: "We created a clear and practical pathway for organisations to incorporate risk and understand how the risks effect their impact on the ground. We aimed to bring practical water stewardship integration to an organisation's business model and culture, creating a nexus between energy, biodiversity, waste and an organisation's 2030, 2040 and 2050 wider sustainability goals."

What companies would benefit from certification?

Kevin Warner: "There are organisations that have a publicly announced plans or goals for water stewardship, but don't really have a pathway for implementation. We see our new certification programme as a clear solution for operations across industries."

Many multinational companies are actively addressing water stewardship in their sustainability goals, acknowledging for example, that water conservation and reuse initiatives are needed to address water scarcity and quality issues, both in offices and in the river basins they operate in.

We see our new certification programme as a clear solution for operations across industries

Lauren Enright: "There are companies who are well versed in water stewardship best practices that are increasing their own water monitoring. They want to get certified for reputational reasons and want to see firsthand the practicality of implementing the framework of the standard on the ground."

She added: "Then there are other companies who are not ready for certification that need to understand their overall enterprise water usage and are ready to drill into water risk assessments to understand the relative impact on a site-by-site basis."

The standard development process

Kevin Warner: "SCS has a long history of sustainability standards development. We employed a multistakeholder process to develop the draft standard with technical experts and internal SCS colleagues and then opened it up for public comment."

In this case, comments were received from many sources, including NGOs and multinational organisations, consultants, auditors and government officials. These comments were considered and evaluated for inclusion in the final version of the standard.

There is clearly an appetite for a programme like ours in the marketplace. The robust response helped us to build a much stronger, final standard

Kevin Warner: "The development process for the SCS WSR was notable in that the comments we received were more extensive than I've seen in other processes we've had. There is clearly an appetite for a programme like ours in the marketplace. The robust response helped us to build a much stronger, final standard."

The standard went through a comment period from March to April (2024) which lasted 30 days. The SCS team then spent a month reviewing the comments and editing the standard. The SCS Water Stewardship and Resiliency Standard was officially launched in the middle of June.

Lauren Enright: "We have received broad interest and uptake since launching the standard and have started to build trusted provider partnerships and collaborations with engineering, technology and consultancy firms."

Gaining certification and going above and beyond

Certification occurs in two stages: A pre-stage document review, followed by a half-day, onsite audit. The certificate is valid for three years; following initial certification, two years of surveillance audits and then, in the third-year, recertification would be required.

Kevin Warner: "Our certification process requires a system for continuous improvement. The criteria in the Standard are arranged in tiers (Tier 1, Tier 2, and Trailblazers). Continuous improvement is built into the Tier 2 requirements. In the first year, you're creating a lot of baseline data, then you're tracking improvements off the baseline each year."

Continuous improvement is built into the Tier 2 requirements

The standard also features optional and aspirational 'trailblazer' achievements. These are opportunities for clients to focus on areas that matter to them – for example, if they've got more land impacts, it might be that the biodiversity trailblazer gets prioritised for focus. The trailblazer categories go above and beyond the baseline of risk assessment and data collection and offer clients recognition for demonstrating social and environmental leadership.

The trailblazer programmes are:

• Natural Habitat and Biodiversity Impacts
• Nature Based Solutions
• Innovative Technologies
• Water Circularity
• Net-Zero Water Use
• Net-Positive Water Use
• Water Quality Improvement
• Community Engagement
   

For more information, please visit: https://www.scsglobalservices.com/services/water-stewardship-and-resiliency-certification