What is it about?
Water is perhaps our world’s most precious and most pervasive natural resource. We as citizens and agents of water-intensive corporations need to find the most sustainable ways of managing water resources in a global scale. Inevitably the way we abstract, use and dispose of water affects our capacity to protect aquatic biodiversity, provide ecological services (notably to fight poverty), ensure safe sanitary conditions, generate hydro-power, provide source of food and drink and make sure that people continue to enjoy the aesthetic beauty and recreational activities that water areas offer. In this article, I reflect on the complexity of corporate water responsibility to highlight firm capacity to move toward sustainable water use and practical improvements that follow from that analysis.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The study is unique in its emphasis on the challenges faced by business organisations in managing water resources. It explores potential solutions for more sustainable abstraction, usage and disposal of water resources by business – the first of this kind in ‘organisation and environment’ studies.
Perspectives
The paper points ahead to the important work to be done in the domain of corporate water responsibility: individuals attempting to enact their own personal / ethical motives in challenging conditions, firms in complex environments tackling important tensions squaring values of profitability, sustainability and water equity, and business leaders working to build collaborative capacity across institutional boundaries to transform cultures of dependency on efficiency gains and shareholder value creation into communities of engaged water citizenship.
Dr Fabien Martinez
fmartinezbarcelo@gmail.com
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Three-Dimensional Conceptual Framework of Corporate Water Responsibility, Organization & Environment, March 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1086026614545632.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
