Our headlines over the last several days have been dominated by water and the ways in which companies are measuring and reducing their use. The impetus: the Stockholm International Water Institute's World Water Week, a gathering of companies, NGOs academics and governments to discuss a myriad of issues related to this precious resource.

Water has long been recognized as a material issue that carries a range of business risks, especially for certain sectors such as food and beverage. Water has taken on even more significance in recent years for PepsiCo, which formally declared access to clean water to be a basic human right in 2009.

The company released its first-ever water stewardship report at World Water Week. To talk more about the report, the human right to water, and happenings on the ground at the event, I caught up with Dan Bena, PepsiCo's director of sustainable development. 

Tilde Herrera: Dan, what are the big headlines coming out of World Water Week this year, what are people talking about, and are there any developments taking place that the business community should be closely following?

Dan Bena: For one of the first times that I can remember, there’s been a remarkable focus on water quality, in terms of incoming quality of water that’s used by a variety of stakeholders and outgoing water quality.  

But more interestingly, and I think germane to PepsiCo, is there’s a lot of focus on how that quality integrates with water as a human right. Last year we came out with public guidelines and support water as a human right. That really has picked up unbelievable momentum, and it’s very evident here on the ground. 

There are multiple sessions that address water as a human right in one way or another. Many of them address quality challenges, because I think that’s in some ways very intuitive for people to hear water quality and think, “Well, you know, obviously people have a right to water that’s safe.” 

But in addition, there is a great dialogue -- and it’s really not a simple dialogue -- about how you implement water as a human right.

TH: I saw in your report that came out this week some of the ways you are implementing that commitment into various facets of your operations, such as your construction guidelines. Are you finding that businesses are becoming more comfortable with that kind of commitment?

DB: You know, it’s really completely mixed. It’s sort of a hodgepodge. There are some private sectors, some companies that are evaluating whether or not they would like to join us in this commitment. There are others who take the position that “We respect water as a human right in everything that we do already, so there’s no need to explicitly state that.” 

And then there is another entire sector, which is really the private water provision sector like the Suezs, which are largely providers of drinking water for communities, they’re really quite concerned about the increasing momentum around water as a human right because they don’t see a line of sight just yet for how they could effectively implement that. 

And the thing that I think has really increased a lot of momentum around this topic is in July when the U.N. General Assembly voted to recognize water as a human right. That was really sort of a milestone achievement, and I think it’s really informed many of the discussions that are happening here.

TH: So what do you think it’s going to take to move that needle forward to get more businesses and more sectors to recognize water as a human right?

DB: You really struck something that I’m so passionate about, because when people, individuals, businesses or governments realize that respecting water as a human right is something that goes far beyond people in developing economies, I think that’s what’s going really move the needle. 

And what I mean by that, Tilde, is many people intuitively will hear “Well, water’s a basic human right,” and they think of what you see sometimes on television commercials or in public service announcements of these poor kids that are literally dying from not having access to water. And that certainly is a very important part of protecting and respecting water as a human right. 

However, it’s not enough. So I think when companies start to realize that they can play an active role within their businesses, within their operations, to support protecting water as a human right, that’s when I think the needle is really starting to move. 

I don’t want to give you any sort of misapprehension. It has not been a particularly simple journey for us here at PepsiCo either, because there’s a lot of education that goes into changing people’s mindsets from this is something that applies in the Indias and Chinas and parts of Latin America, to this applies everywhere in the world, including within our own operations. 

Next Page: The Challenges in Closing the Loop on Water Use