Water Roundtable

Goals of the Water Roundtable

For a water stewardship program to address fully the complex nature of the water issues facing us, it is critical that all stakeholders—social, commercial, public, and civil society work together to achieve agreement on the development of a new, viable voluntary approach to water stewardship. To this end, AWS has developed a global, inclusive, open platform—a multi-year Water Roundtable that is being launched in Brussels in June of 2010.
 
The roundtable process has been used in a variety of settings to engage diverse stakeholders in the development of consensus driven sustainability standards for various commodities including palm oil, cotton, tilapia, sugar, and soy. To be credible, the process to create the standards must be multi-stakeholder, transparent, and open. The process also aims to be strategic, not exhaustive, focusing on the most important issues. The first step is developing consensus around the key impacts to be addressed, as those impacts set the foundation and focus for standards development. Finally, to the extent possible, the standards will be focused on performance, so that organizations across regions and sectors can benchmark themselves, and easily understand what needs to be improved.