The time to take action is now

The water crisis is no longer a thing of the distant future, it has caught up with us wherever we go. It affects our communities, societies, and economies. We see droughts and floods, we see water that is too warm for the life in it and water that is polluted or that gets salinated.

Over the past few years, I have run thousands of kilometres in some of the harshest places in the world like the Atacama Desert and Antarctica. Along the way I have met hundreds of people who have shared their water stories: women and girls in India risking their lives each day to fetch water for their families. Kids in Ghana digging the dirt with their bare hands in search for ground water. Young farmers in South Africa losing any hope to sustain their farms due to drought.?

Last March on World Water Day, I started my Run Blue Campaign. In one year leading up to the UN Water Conference in March 2023, I am running 200 marathons to put water on the global agenda. I have already completed almost half of them. But I don’t only want to raise awareness – my goal is to drive action. The sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the United Nations provides a framework for what type of action is needed.

SDG 6 is about ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. By no means are we anywhere close to achieving this. To get there, we need each and every one of us. Due to their big lever, I believe that companies play a central role in solving the water crisis.

“I am not one to be satisfied with soft language – we need to do better than words.”

This is why I ask companies to commit to take action on water. They need to make water a priority of their business and to embrace it in their values and strategy. Then, companies need to understand the gap between their ambition and the status quo. And most importantly, I call on companies to draw up an action plan and implement it. To help companies get started, I broke down the SDG6 into six axes of water management.

Why don’t I get more specific with what exactly I ask companies to do? Fair question. Here’s why: There is no ‘one fits all’ solution. Every sector has specific needs and possibilities to increase their water efficiency.

Take for example agriculture. It accounts for around 70% of the earth’s freshwater usage. We could save massive amounts of water if the industry managed to close irrigation loops. Over the past few months, I was able to see some of the solutions and innovations on the ground with Run Blue for example in Zambia, where we met with sugar farmers who have installed subsurface drip irrigation underneath their sugar plants and found that is a much more efficient way to keep the plants watered. In the manufacturing space, we spent some time at a cotton weaving, spinning, and manufacturing facility in Türkiye and saw their efforts to ensure that the water that comes out of the plant is cleaner than the water that went in.?

They're also reusing their wastewater; they're trying to become as circular as they can. This idea of circularity – that you don't waste any water and you don't emit water, but you reuse the same water, I think is quite interesting. They're finding that they are getting a lot of benefit from this and reducing the reliance on the increasingly stressed water table. I know that this is also an issue for organizations in the food and beverage space that are trying to maximize wastewater recycling, and minimize dependency on groundwater or other stressed water resources.?

And this comes down again to assessing your water risk and understanding that you operate in an increasingly stressed water environment. And then that means that there's this step to taking action.

It is no coincidence that I asked Bayer to support the Run Blue Campaign. They are part of the problem but also part of the solution: A couple of years ago in Australia I saw that Bayer had introduced special seeds for long fibre cotton. They are more resistant to drought so that even in water scarce years they generate enough revenue for the farmers to live off. I felt that they were sincere about doing their bit to solve the water crisis, so I approached them. We need to be in this together to move the needle.

If you, too, want to join us, please do. Look around you, find the small and the big things you can move in your private household or at work. Get creative, get active – and if you want, join us virtually for “Sweat 4 Soap” from October 10-15. You can register online and for every kilometre you pledge to walk or run, a bar of soap will be donated to a community in need. See you there! And with this, I hand the mic back to you, Werner.?It was great to meet you in person in Berlin earlier this week!