Rising to Resilience

Climate change is a leading sustainability concern for business, as demonstrated by the move toward science-based carbon reduction or net-zero emission targets to try and bend the curve on global temperature rises.[1]

At the same time, companies are also realizing that climate change is already happening. As we assess which impacts climate change will have on core business operations, customers and supply chains, we also see that water is the primary medium through which we feel the change – for example, droughts, desertification, flooding and quality impairment. In short, climate change brings too much or too little water to businesses, communities and economies worldwide.

The question is: What do we do? How do we build resilience to the volatility, disruptions and vulnerabilities caused by the climate crisis into our businesses and our supply chains? And how do we use nature, especially through the lens of water, as a lever to building climate resilience for business?

This week, two new actionable business guides, spearheaded by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and in collaboration with The Coca-Cola Company, have been released to help business build impactful strategies and interventions for climate resilience through nature and water stewardship:

• Rising to Resilience: A practical guide for business and nature
• Rising to Resilience: How water stewardship can help business build climate resilience

Here is why you should read them: This collaboration is built on a long-standing watershed conservation partnership with the WWF Central America team, local communities and authorities in Guatemala. Over the past three years, our teams worked together to develop, trial and test approaches to assess, plan, build and track climate resilience in the watershed. The report reflects practical action, not theory.

If you’d like to hear from the other side, I recommend this excellent blogpost by David Kuhn and Nicole Tanner from WWF.

In a nutshell, my personal learning from this work is this:

• Climate resilience, nature and water stewardship are intertwined and business must put more urgency and attention on these issues – because everybody will be impacted by climate change and we all depend on water.
• Ecosystems - mangroves, peatlands, grassland, wetlands and forests - are the key to improving resilience and they are also important to support carbon sequestration. Investment, however, should be targeted and at scale, so business needs to build its conservation capabilities by partnering with experts (like WWF, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Wetlands International and many others) to help them understand where and how to engage to make an impact.
• The leading work on advancing water stewardship like science-based water targets, nature-based solutions, and collective action is critical and needs to be turbocharged. If you are a company wondering where to look, consider joining the Alliance for Water Stewardship, the CEO Water Mandate Action Hub and Resilience Coalition, the 2030 Water Resources Group or Business for Nature to tap into this knowledge, build a community and create scale.
• Climate resilience planning means ‘futureproofing’ our sustainability efforts under climate change conditions and enabling a quick ‘rebound’ after an event. Practical solutions and specific interventions need to reflect the local context and require community empowerment engagement, networked institutions and capacity building.

As we transition to our 2030 water strategy across the Coca-Cola system, integrating the principles of climate resilience can help us prepare for the ever-evolving effects of climate change. We hope that by using this guide, businesses will further the connection between water security and climate resilience through collective action. Water is a shared resource that we all depend on – and we can make a stronger impact when we all work together.

Footnote: [1] The Coca-Cola Company has set a science-based climate target to reduce scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions for the Coca-Cola system and conducted a full climate change impact assessment following the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD): https://www.coca-colacompany.com/sustainable-business/climate/science-based-targets