Water is a shared resource — a global necessity, but on a management level, a local system.

Pedro Sancha, the senior vice president of Nalco Water, an EcoLab company, discussed the challenges and opportunities of water stewardship in the era of climate change. "Companies need to look outside and collaborate with other users in the watershed. It needs to be context-based," he said. 

Jason Morrison, president of the Pacific Institute, one of the world's leading research institutions for water issues, knows that this is a crucial time for global and regional freshwater. With droughts and other crises occurring with increasing frequency, finding scalable solutions has an even more urgent nature.

Todd Brady, the corporate environmental manager at Intel Corp., discusses how to leverage the clout of the large tech company for positive impact. One of the major way that he and the company seek to do so is by financing innovative environmental projects, working on the local level in order to see real results. He discusses some of these projects, including one specific watershed resource — it's "strategic in nature," he noted.

The circular economy's focus on keeping materials and chemicals at play extends to one of the basic elements of human life: water. But localized water systems present certain challenges to maximize water's "quantity, quality and value," as EcoLab's vice president of sustainability, Emilio Tenuta, said.