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Primary stakeholders

Traditionally water stress concerns water users and water managers as they are the principal stakeholders. First at local to regional level, then at national level, and since the publication of the EU Communication on Water Scarcity & Drought in 2007 explicitly at EU level. In parallel, the diversity of the audience increases. Water stress and its expected adverse economic consequences increasingly draw the attention of the financing world and insurance companies (EEA, 2019c). The World Economic Forum has listed ‘extreme weather’ in its top-5 of risks with the highest likelihood since 2014, and in its top-5 of risks with the highest impact since 2017. The urgency and magnitude of the challenge is also stated in a recent World Bank report (World Bank, 2016) which, amongst others, indicates that water scarcity could cost some regions up to 6 % of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The adverse impacts of water abstractions on the environment have driven water stress and drought issues up the priority list of societal organisations such as Right2Water Citizen Initiative (Anonymous, 2020) and of nature protection NGOs such as the WWF and IUCN (Trémolet S. et al., 2019), while scarcity risk is addressed in the year plans of multinational companies such as Intel (Aquatech, 2019), Coca-Cola and Unilever. The Water Footprint Assessment has played an important role in raising awareness of the implicit role of water in global production and trade. Several networks of private enterprises (such as the WBCSD, the Carbon Initiative,  Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable (BIER)) have made steps to incorporate water as part of the scope of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, as does the European Water Stewardship scheme. All this goes to demonstrate that water stress is no longer the sole concern of water managing authorities and direct water users. The ‘newly involved’ stakeholders can have a crucial role in the design and implementation of nature-based solutions, as illustrated in the NAIAD project (Section 6.4).