World Water Week 2023

21 Aug 2023 Sustainability
World Water Week 2023

At Diageo, we’re passionate about the importance of water; it’s a crucial resource for our communities, in our production and for our business.

At Diageo, we’re passionate about the importance of water; it’s a crucial resource for our communities, in our production and for our business.

Our pioneering approach to water underpins our climate resilience, the health of our communities and it helps to address gender inequalities. That’s why we take a holistic approach to managing our water, and we understand that we must address our water use and water management at all the touchpoints along our supply chain to be a sustainable business for the future.

This World Water Week, we’re celebrating a few highlights of our water work throughout our last financial year (July 2022-July 2023), as we continue our journey to our 2030 ESG goals.

  • We completed 35 community water projects in 11 countries which included wetland restoration, rainwater harvesting and tree planting across Africa, India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia. This includes investing in 17 WASH projects in seven countries, bringing safe water and sanitation to over 70,000 people.
  • We’ve completed our first WASH project in Mexico, achieving our 2030 target to implement WASH programmes in the nine markets where we operate. But we’re not stopping there. We’ll continue to invest in WASH programmes around the world so we can continue to reach more communities in the areas we operate.
  • We’ve also expanded our WASH work. We believe that when you invest in water, you empower women. So, in each community where we run a WASH project, we’ve set up a committee with equal representation from men and women. This includes facilitating community dialogue on gender awareness training. This year 56% of WASH committee members were women across our programmes in nine countries. 
  • Diageo’s distillery in Alwar, Rajasthan became the first spirit distillery in Asia to receive the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Certification. The AWS standard is a sustainability framework that recognises the credible and verifiable actions companies are taking to protect water resources. 
  • We maintained our CDP A rating in both water and carbon. This is our 7th year in a row and has placed us among the top percentile of companies.

We’ll be continuing throughout the next financial year to use our voice for good and to establish partnerships for knowledge sharing, project implementation and collective action to address the water crisis. We’re at World Water Week in Stockholm this week, where we’ll be speaking at events including: the importance of gender equality in WASH programmes, the power of innovation for water security and water’s contribution to regenerative agriculture.

We’ll also be at UN General Assembly and COP28, because we know it’s the power of collective action that brings change.

Watch the video below to see some of our water work in action and read more about our progress on our environmental goals in this years Annual Report.