By James Dalton of IUCN’s Global Water Programme. Version française
A year ago I wrote a blog post on a workshop that we jointly held with the Ramsar Secretariat in partnership with Danone Waters – the bottled water arm of the French multinational. It caught people’s attention, partly because of what we were doing, and partly because of who we were doing it with. We made a commitment at that workshop, with Danone Waters, to follow up on the workshop, and to report back to the participants about corporate changes in water management practices.
Last year’s workshop was designed to jointly review an internal water management tool Danone had developed. We brought together a diverse range of people to help us do this – a remarkable group in their openness and willingness to collaborate beyond ‘expert silos’. This year we re-convened the same group with the company to discuss progress in adopting the recommendations made a year ago.
We saw great change in the work that was presented to us by Danone Waters. The water management tool had been revised based on many of the recommendations made last year. It was one of those moments where you realise that working with the private sector can bring rapid change.
We had also identified the need for policy change within the company on water management. The company had clearly listened to this. We were presented with a draft outline of a new corporate water policy for the Danone Group (soon to be announced). Reviewing the technical nature of the work had clearly helped identify the need to expand groundwater policy into wider overall corporate water policy for the Danone Group.
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