River reflections from Stockholm: underestimating a decade of achievements

Reflecting is both a physical property and a mental process. Having spent the last week at World Water Week in Stockholm, as I sat at the side of the waterway in Stockholm, the phrase “reflections” seemed highly appropriate.

World Water Week is an annual event which brings together many of the world’s leading thinkers and advocates for freshwater – indeed, I suspect many (perhaps even most!) of you reading this blog have been to #WWWeek or are well aware of its importance as a knowledge sharing & networking event on the annual calendar.

So what are my reflections from Stockholm this year?

Well, sitting along the edge of the river, I found myself reflecting back not just over the past few days, but over the past decade. Indeed, as I sat enjoying a beautiful sunset, it was a quote from Bill Gates (via the wonderful Henk Ovink) that kept rolling around in my head:

“We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade”

So true. So, rather than list a bulleted list of key takeaways from the past few days, having come to Stockholm for nearly a decade now, I thought its worth reflecting over the past years.

When I first came to Stockholm, back in 2010, the water world looked rather different: stewardship was still an emergent concept, the Alliance for Water Stewardship (#A4WS) was under construction, CDP Water had only recently launched, WWF’s Water Risk Filter and WRI’s Aqueduct were years away from launch still, and only a handful of leading companies were present. Fast forward nine years and the landscape is radically different. We now have stewardship firmly embedded across multiple sectors; AWS has over 100 members including players like Apple, Nestle, and Edeka with over 40 certified sites and hundreds in the pipeline; CDP Water has thousands of companies disclosing data, and the Water Risk Filter is in version 5.0 with hundreds of thousands of sites having been assessed.

If I could go back and tell that fresher-faced younger version of myself what we would collectively accomplish as a community, I’m sure he’d have been skeptical. Yet I do feel that we, as a relatively small community, in the face of 7 billion souls, have made a HUGE difference and it sometimes takes a decade to reflect back and realize just how much has happened. We have made a difference in a decade, so don't sweat the daily frustrations quite so much.

This made me wonder: what could the coming decade bring? What am I currently underestimating?

If I were to read the tea leaves of Stockholm Water Week this year, I’d offer up some of the following predictions when I (possibly) come back on a blog a decade from now:

• Nature-Based Solutions will mainstream and be enabled through 4IR.
• The value of water, along with financial flows, will have grown by orders of magnitude.
• Sectoral pre-competitive collaboration will have a strong evidence base with established platforms in multiple sectors.
• We will continue to see huge water challenges resulting in both conflict and peace-building.
• Cities will be far more present at World Water Week and help us integrate water & climate via resilience.

I could likely build out blogs on each of these predictions, but I’ll save you that pleasure. If you’re interested to hear more or why, drop me a note, or a comment here, and let’s continue the dialogue. Moreover, let’s be ambitious before we meet again here in Stockholm next year, and not be too hard on ourselves if we don’t accomplish all that we’d hoped. I suspect that by 2030, we’ll have achieved more than we might have ever anticipated.