From the Financial Times:
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in Davos,January 25 2008
Businesses are doing too little to tackle a looming water crisis, Ban Ki-Moon warned the World Economic Forum on Thursday, describing their response to a UN water sustainability initiative as “a drop in the bucket”.

Water has displaced climate change as Davos delegates’ chief worry outside the US economy, with no fewer than nine water-related events on the programme, compared with just one last year.

“What we did for climate change last year, we want to do for water and development in 2008,” the UN secretary-general told the meeting, highlighting “water stress” as a common denominator between disease, rising food prices and crises such as the Darfur conflict.

A handful of corporate leaders called for more engagement from governments and business, after Mr Ban complained that only a fraction of the 1,000 companies represented in Davos had joined the UN’s CEO Water Mandate, launched six months ago.

“We feel a little bit frustrated that up to now only 20 companies have signed up,” said Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and chief executive of Nestlé, the food and drink group. Agriculture, rather than industry, accounted for 70 per cent of water use, he added.

But he lambasted governments for “trying to solve one problem – the energy problem – by making another one – the nutritional problem – worse” in promoting biofuels. About 1,000 litres of water were needed to create one litre of bio–diesel, he said.

A price must be put on water use, Mr Brabeck-Letmathe added, calling for the creation of trading schemes for water akin to the exchanges created for carbon allowances.

Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical, likened water shortages to concerns over other scarce resources, describing water as “the oil of this century”.

In spite of the close connection between global warming and drought, water issues had got lost as part of the climate change debate, said Neville Isdell, chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola.

Companies had the know-how and the profit motive to find solutions to a problem that directly affected many businesses’ supply chains, delegates said, but they called for collaboration with governments and non-governmental organisations.

Unless the communities in which Coca-Cola operated had access to water, “we haven’t got a business”, said Mr Isdell.

A year after companies used the alpine gathering to trumpet their efforts to reduce their carbon footprints, several executives highlighted a new ambition to become “water neutral” as well as “carbon neutral”.

“Our goal is to get net zero water usage. We want to have a closed system where we’re not parasites on the earth,” Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, told the FT. Such progress would happen only if companies appointed an individual to take responsibility for their sustainable water policies, she said.

Water-related events at the forum range from private sessions for the food and beverage industries to a debate on “thirsty energy”, which is expected to examine ways of reducing the amount of water used in extracting oil.