Water resilience: what it means and how to measure it
As climate extremes distort the water cycle and disrupt infrastructure, we need to seriously ask: what does it mean for a water system, and the society that depends on it, to be truly resilient?
SUSTAINABLE FINANCEWATE RESILENCECLIMATE RESILENCE
Feng Hu
5/25/20265 min read
Water is the foundation for social and economic development and also a medium through which climate risks manifest. 4 billion people still face severe water scarcity at least one month every year. A quarter of the world’s population lacks regular access to clean drinking water. 90% of disasters are water-related, and they account for nearly 95% of infrastructure loss and damage worldwide. In 2025 alone, around 8 million people were displaced due to water-related disasters.
The water system's fragility is definitely not limited to developing countries. In Wellington, New Zealand, where I live, a wastewater treatment plant was shut down by flooding in February this year, resulting in the discharge of roughly 70 million litres per day of untreated sewage. The plant won’t be fully fixed until late 2027.
It is not surprising that there’s increasing focus on “water resilience”, a technical concept that is now entering the vocabulary of heads of government, central bankers, and chief executives. However, despite its growing prominence in strategy documents and investor presentations, the term remains inadequately defined. This lack of clarity hinders our ability to identify root causes and determine concrete, effective actions for building long-term resilience.
This article, the first in a two-part series, seeks to unpack what water resilience means, how it differs from related concepts, and how policymakers and investors can begin to measure it with the rigour the challenge demands.
From water stress, water security, to water resilience
Many corporates and investors are now familiar with tools such as WRI’s Aqueduct and its core indicators on water stress, defined as the ratio of demand to supply. It tells us how hard the current supply system is being stretched. Water security broadens the lens to encompass access, quality, and the infrastructure to deliver “adequate quantities of acceptable quality water“ to sustain societies and ecosystems.
IPCC defines “resilience” as “the capacity of interconnected social, economic and ecological systems to cope with a hazardous event, trend or disturbance, responding or reorganising in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure”. In the context of water, water resilience could be defined as the capacity of a water system and all the social, economic, and institutional systems that depend on it to absorb shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and transform in ways that reduce future vulnerability.
Compared to other concepts, water resilience emphasises the capacity of the whole system, rather than just the physical body of water, or the institutions and systems that govern its access, supply and quality. Water resilience is a desirable outcome and state, but also an ongoing endeavour that requires proactively anticipating, assessing and adapting to changes over time, and potentially “bouncing forward” to an improved system.
A focus on water resilience requires us, whether as individual households, organisations, or society as a whole, to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship with water. This entails a more holistic consideration of how we supply, use and protect water and how our interactions affect, and are affected by, others and the ecosystems that depend on the same vital resources.
How can we measure water resilience?
If resilience is to move beyond conceptual framing, it must be measurable to guide action. The field is advancing but unevenly, and in ways that reveal as much about political as technical constraints. Several established indicator frameworks already exist for measuring water risks or governance.
UN-Water's SDG 6 monitoring framework tracks 11 global indicators spanning access, water quality, ecosystem condition, and transboundary cooperation.
The OECD's Water Governance Indicator Framework assesses the effectiveness, efficiency, and trust dimensions of water governance at the country level.
WRI's Aqueduct 4.0 offers high-resolution, globally comparable data on 13 water risk indicators with projections to 2080 under multiple climate scenarios. It remains the most widely used tool for corporate and investor-level water risk screening.
None of these indicator frameworks measures resilience in its full sense. Most of them are better at capturing exposure (what hazards exist and where) and stress (how stretched current systems are) than adaptive capacity.
In terms of dedicated water resilience frameworks, perhaps the most significant recent development is the adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators at COP30 in November 2025, after the two-year UAE-Belém work programme since the adoption of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience at COP28. Water emerged as the strongest-performing thematic area in this political process. Of the indicators proposed by technical experts under the UAE-Belém work programme, 9 out of 10 water-related indicators were retained in the final set of 59 indicators. This outcome reflects the systemic importance of water for climate resilience across sectors. Although voluntary, non-prescriptive, and country-driven, the Belém indicators, for the first time, can create a multilaterally agreed, technically validated framework specifically designed to track national progress on water resilience as a climate adaptation outcome.
Another recent development is the Water Resilience Tracker (WRT), an initiative currently operating across six countries spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than proposing yet another standalone index, the WRT applies a resilience "lens" to existing indicator frameworks, enabling practitioners to learn about system behaviour, identify interpretive gaps, and construct honest, decision-relevant narratives, as articulated in its Technical Note. For national-level implementation, a key WRT output is the National Resilience Snapshot, which “converts indicator evidence into a small set of time-bound decisions, framed by system thresholds and distributional consequences”. This design choice highlights that measuring water resilience is not just about data, but also how data gets interpreted and used.
Beyond the Belém Adaptation Indicators and the WRT, there are also other frameworks, which often differ in their applicable scope and target users (summarised in the table below).
Frameworks are only as useful as their implementation. To inform decision making, it requires building the data systems, institutional capacity, and interpretive skills to use them meaningfully at the local level.
However, no single universal framework is likely to capture all the dimensions and interdependencies of resilience in a coherent, comparable, and decision-ready form. The complexity of water resilience means that it cannot be reduced to just a set of indicators, not to mention any single measurement.
The key is not about picking the perfect framework, but a suitable one. The true value of using a framework and its measurements lies in building the capacity to assess our relationship with water, evaluate the current governance and infrastructure, and make necessary adjustments. This process, in turn, enhances the capacity of both the water system and all connected social, economic, and institutional systems.
From frameworks to decisions
Addressing water resilience requires a multifaceted, layered approach, as it cannot be simplified into a single metric or framework. This could mean combining physical risk data, governance diagnostics, and financial analysis, applied at a scale appropriate to how water flows through the systems, often at the basin level rather than being constrained by administrative boundaries.
Something significant shifted in recent global conversation about water. The OECD's landmark 2025 report on embedding water risks into financial stability frameworks found that water-related financial risks are increasingly recognised as critical threats to economic and financial stability due to climate change, ecosystem degradation, and sectoral dependencies, and that current supervisory tools are poorly equipped to capture them.
On 4 June 2025, the European Commission adopted its landmark Water Resilience Strategy, the first comprehensive EU-wide framework explicitly built around resilience. The European Water Resilience Strategy (EWRS) covers more than 50 key actions, a target of a 10% reduction in water consumption by 2030 and a new "water efficiency first" principle designed to embed water management at the heart of business operations and investment decisions.
Beyond policies, the momentum is also building in the corporate world. CDP recorded a 100% increase in corporate water disclosures in 2024 and another steady 2.6% increase in 2025, approaching the 10,000 milestone. Companies are now reporting US$339 billion in potential financial impacts linked to water-related risks. The number of companies with water security A-scores, the highest performance rating, more than doubled from 101 in 2023 to 263 in 2025.
The development of water resilience assessment frameworks, coupled with progress in both policy and corporate disclosures, marks a genuine turning point. For policymakers, it argues for integrating water resilience indicators into national development planning, climate finance allocation, and sovereign risk assessments. For investors and corporates, this points toward a more granular approach to water risk that goes beyond current ESG screening tools. And for the international community, it reinforces the need for open, standardised, and shared hydrological data as a global public good.
In Part 2 of this series, we will turn from measurement to action: what building water resilience actually requires — across infrastructure, governance, and finance — and why cross-border cooperation, including along Belt and Road corridors, is not optional but essential.