Achieving universal, safely managed water and sanitation services by 2030, as envisioned by the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, is projected to require capital expenditures of USD 114 billion per year (1). Investment on that scale, along with accompanying policy reforms, can be motivated by a growing appreciation of the value of water. Yet our ability to value water, and incorporate these values into water governance, is inadequate. Newly recognized cascading negative impacts of water scarcity, pollution, and flooding underscore the need to change the way we value water (2). With the UN/World Bank High Level Panel on Water having launched the Valuing Water Initiative in 2017 to chart principles and pathways for valuing water, we see a global opportunity to rethink the value of water. We outline four steps toward better valuation and management (see the box), examine recent advances in each of these areas, and argue that these four steps must be integrated to overcome the barriers that have stymied past efforts

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Water security aims to provide safe, reliable, affordable and sufficient water for people, agriculture, industry and ecosystems, subject to societal choices across related trade‐offs and risks. Managing resource risks, delivering effective governance, promoting financial sustainability and achieving social equity are central to achieving water security. We explore how innovations in mobile communications have created an inclusive, secure and low cost architecture for financial and data flows to reduce risk and enhance water security. In Africa, water security challenges associated with climate extremes and population growth outstripping improved water services’ access are juxtaposed with its global lead in mobile commerce innovations, including mobile water payments. Market driven expansion of mobile network coverage and low cost, mobile handsets mean more Africans will be connected to mobile phone services than those receiving improved water services in 2012. The confluence of rapid mobile network expansion, mobile phone ownership, mobile water payments and smart metering technologies offer new policy pathways to water security to accelerate progress on sustainable, safe water access, particularly for those in the greatest need and those most difficult to reach. We chart emerging mobile water innovations in Africa and policy implications in the region and beyond. Policy Implications  Mobile communication innovations offer an inclusive, secure and low cost architecture for financial and data flows that can reduce or share risk to enhance water security.  The confluence of mobile network coverage, mobile phone ownership, mobile water payments and smart water metering technologies has significant but uncharted potential to enhance water security.  Innovations are being driven by the commercial interests of mobile network operators with the distributional impacts and implications yet to be evaluated or shaped by policy and governance regimes.  Living in rural and remote areas may no longer be synonymous with a higher risk of water insecurity as mobile connectivity could permit innovative management models at scale.

This paper considers corporate water risk from the perspective of company disclosure. An empirical study, it reviews 6 years' disclosure for 58 companies in the global consumer staples sector. Drawing on a conceptual framework of institutional theory and resource dependence, it examines the disclosed yardsticks by which multinational companies measure their management of water risk. The first empirical study of its kind, it suggests that companies target future improvements that are generally less aspirational than their historic achievements. This appears to be a function of diminishing marginal returns on efficiency investment, exacerbated by a rational reluctance to venture beyond the 'fence line'. The evidence suggests that corporate water risk is increasingly viewed as a political rather than operational issue within the disclosure matrix. Current perceptions of best practice are entrenching a status quo that is fundamentally unfit for purpose given the scale of the challenges that need to be addressed over the rest of this decade, and beyond.

This paper considers corporate water risk disclosure from the perspective of professional investors. An empirical study, it draws on findings from detailed interviews conducted with Chief Investment Officers and other senior investment professionals at fund management firms in Australia, South Africa, the UK and the USA. It establishes that investors generally regard extant corporate water risk disclosure as unfit for purpose, and explains why investors nonetheless tolerate the status quo. The study draws on a conceptual framework of stakeholder salience, myopia and proximity to describe a 'predictability discount' that exists in terms of investor decision making behaviour in the face of actual or perceived water risk. The extent of this discount is shaped by four temporal conditions: the near past; the distant past; the near future; and the distant future. The research also finds that investors assume companies are more cognisant of water risk than their disclosure implies.