From Risk Assessment to Action
What executives learned about water resilience at the Economist Impact WaterSummit
From Risk Assessment to Action – What executives learned about water resilience at the Economist Impact Water Summit
When water fails, the consequences for businesses escalate faster than most leadership teams expect. At the Economist Impact Water Summit, Water Direct led a practical workshop focused on turning water disruption from an abstract risk into operational decisions and next steps.
One message landed clearly: water resilience is no longer a sustainability sidebar — it is a business continuity issue.
Water Direct CEO Adam Johnson highlighted that in the UK, decades of under–investment and rising incident frequency mean that asset failure risk is no longer exceptional — it’s a defining operational pressure. With no legal responsibility for utility companies to help private businesses, this should act as a wakeup call for industry to take the reins.
What leaders said are still unknowns:
The roundtables surfaced consistent gaps:
• Time–to–impact is often unclear: what fails first and how fast?
• The hardest barriers are organisational: ownership, decision rights, escalation and incomplete site data
• For some sectors, reputation and regulation become the first failure point
• The hardest barriers are organisational: ownership, decision rights, escalation and incomplete site data
• For some sectors, reputation and regulation become the first failure point
Four truths executives can’t ignore:
1)Time–to–impact is often unknown. Many organisations cannot answer,
• What fails first — welfare, cooling, production, hygiene/compliance?
• How long can we run on storage or reduced operations?
• Where are our single points of failure on site?
2) Water is local — so resilience must be site–specific
Global standards matter, but water risk is driven by local infrastructure reliability, regulation, basin stress and community tolerance.
For some companies, such as food and drink manufacturers, water is a licence to operate, requiring site–level efficiency and local collaboration.
For others such as hotel operators, there is a reputational tension when demand peaks in stressed regions meaning expectations and constraints collide quickly.
3) The real cost isn’t the water — it’s the knock–on impact
Boards understand this instantly: disruption costs are driven by downtime, compliance exposure, restart complexity, penalties and reputational damage.
This changes the business case — resilience should be funded as avoided loss, not water savings.
4)The hardest barriers aren’t always technical — they’re organisational
• unclear decision rights during incidents,
• weak ownership across estates/ops/sustainability,
• incomplete site data (storage capacity, connection readiness, minimum
volumes),
• difficulty justifying spend when water is cheap,
• and uncertainty about what response time is actually achievable.
• weak ownership across estates/ops/sustainability,
• incomplete site data (storage capacity, connection readiness, minimum
volumes),
• difficulty justifying spend when water is cheap,
• and uncertainty about what response time is actually achievable.
The key takeaway:
A simple 180–day takeaway for leadership teams was discussed:
1. Quantify time–to–fail for priority sites
2. Set deliverable response objectives
3. Put assured response options in place — and test them
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