World Water Week 2026 – Water for People and Progress
August 18, 2026
World Water Week (WWW) is the leading conference on global water issues, where experts come together to collaborate and share ideas, experiences, and lessons learned. The water conference will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, and virtually from Sunday, August 23, through Thursday, August 27. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) hosts World Water Week each year to bring together organizations from all sectors and regions to find solutions to the world’s most significant water-related challenges.
Laura Ziemelis, Tim Dekker, Gregg Brill, and Nate Jacobson, experts and leaders from LimnoTech’s water stewardship team, look forward to participating and presenting. Join the sessions and side events where our team will share their knowledge and experience with the speakers, conveners, and panelists listed.
Restoring Land, Replenishing Water, Renewing Rural Economies
Date/Time: Sunday, August 23, 16:00-17:30 CEST (10:00 am – 11:30 pm EDT)
Location: Online & On-site C3, Level 2 (Session ID 12737)
About: Rural economies are experiencing an economic upheaval not seen since the Great Depression. Rising input costs, shrinking margins, and a reshaping global agricultural economy are putting working lands and the communities that depend on them under immense pressure. The challenge is no longer just economic: it is how to keep ecologically critical agricultural land productive and intact while the financial ground shifts beneath it.
This session explores how alternative environmental markets can open new revenue pathways for rural landowners and communities. Using prairie restoration as a central case study, we examine how ecosystem services, including water replenishment, water quality, biodiversity, and alternative production systems, can support farmers, strengthen domestic energy production, improve watershed health, and build more resilient rural economies. This is a “learn with us” conversation: part field report, part open exploration of what these emerging markets can realistically offer and where the gaps remain.
Session Host: Elena Ziendas (Roeslein)
Speakers: Jairo Trad (Kilimo), Stefanie Woodward (Meta), Gregg Brill (LimnoTech), Nancy Kavazanjian (Crop Farmer, Hammer and Kavazanjian Farms), Peter Dahm (Cargill)
Moderator: Sam Sugerman (Roeslein)
Convenors: Roeslein Alternative Energy, LimnoTech, American Soybean Farmers, Meta, Kilimo
Session Description: Changing markets, tightening margins, and climate stress are forcing landowners to rethink what working lands can realistically support. Continuing to farm marginal land is often not viable, but abandoning it is not an answer either. Alternative production and nature-based solutions, with water at the center, offer a third path: restoring land, building domestic supply chains, and paying landowners for the measurable environmental benefits their acres produce.
This session examines how that model works in practice, what makes a water benefit credible to corporate buyers and utilities, and how programs can be structured so value flows back to rural communities rather than bypassing them. Prairie restoration serves as our central case study, grounding the conversation in a real program with real tradeoffs.
We will hear directly from the people navigating these markets: a farmer in the US Midwest weighing what restoration means for their operation, a corporate water stewardship team evaluating nature-based replenishment, and a nonprofit working to ensure rural communities capture the value these programs generate. Together they will explore what these markets can realistically deliver today and what it will take to scale them.
Advancing water stewardship with credible benefit accounting: VWBA2.0, WQBA, BioBA
Date/Time: Monday, August 24, 16:30-18:00 CEST (10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT)
Location: Online & On-site A4, Level 6 (Session ID 12361)
About: Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA 2.0), Water Quality Benefit Accounting (WQBA), and Biodiversity Benefit Accounting (BioBA) provide clarity, consistency, and credibility to water stewardship. The session will unpack case studies to illustrate how this guidance can support practitioners to plan, quantify, track and credibly communicate the multi-benefits of water stewardship projects.
Session Hosts: Laura Ziemelis (LimnoTech), Naabia Ofosu-Amaah (The Nature Conservancy), Nate Jacobson (LimnoTech), Klaudia Schachtschneider (Pacific Institute), Sara Walker (World Resources Institute), Gregg Brill (LimnoTech)
Panelists: Anna Escuer (Google), Una Hrnjak (Aldi South Group), Patrick Quigley (Arable)
Convenors: Google, LimnoTech, Pacific Institute, The Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute
Session Description: For almost two decades, corporate water stewardship investments have delivered volumetric, water quality, and biodiversity benefits to people and the environment. Project development, implementation, benefit quantification, and credible reporting require clear and standardized guidance to facilitate collaboration between corporate partners and on-the-ground implementers. A shared approach and common language can build trust, alignment between parties, and a mutual understanding of project benefits. Three new complementary publications (VWBA 2.0, WQBA, BioBA) provide consistent, pragmatic, and science-based principles and guidance to ensure a stronger contribution to addressing water challenges that affect people and the environment.
This session will examine diverse case studies to share practical knowledge and best practices. Case studies will be viewed through multiple lenses of project implementers, funders, and practitioners responsible for benefit quantification and reporting. Presenters and panelists will share technical and programmatic project details, the value of the guidance and lessons learned, with linkage to how projects help build a more equitable, water-secure future for people and better care for our planet. Case studies will encompass varied project configurations: NGO and private sector implementing partners, nature-based solutions and water infrastructure improvements, bilateral and collaborative investments, and volumetric and multi-benefit (water quality, biodiversity, socio-economic) project objectives.
Introducing the Water Stewardship Project Accelerator (WSPA)
Date/Time: Monday, August 24, 12:30 – 13:30 CEST
Location: SIDE EVENT – Scandic Haymarket Hotel (Hötorget 13–15), Stockholm
Topic: Scaling Investments in Nature for Water
About: Launched by LimnoTech and strategic partners, the WSPA is an initiative that takes water stewardship projects from concept to bankable, verifiable action. We address the urgent need for measurable water impact with a pipeline of curated, high-integrity projects ready for investment and quantified using rigorous frameworks like VWBA, WQBA, and BioBA.
WSPA is built around four stakeholders: Corporates get a credible, de-risked way to meet water stewardship commitments with outcomes they can report and verify. Public sector partners gain a mechanism to attract private capital toward priority basins and align with local, regional, and national water security goals. Communities see real investment land in the watersheds they depend on, with local benefit and engagement built into project design from day one. And the environment gets restored flows, cleaner water, and healthier ecosystems.
At this launch, we will introduce WSPA to the global water community, share the opportunities the WSPA can help deliver, and open the door to new partners. We invite implementers, funders, corporates, public agencies, and NGOs to join us to build long-term water resilience through accelerated action and catalytic investments in nature-based, agricultural, and technology solutions.
Panelists/Speakers: Tim Dekker (LimnoTech), Gregg Brill (LimnoTech), Laura Ziemelis (LimnoTech), James Rees (Noverram), Stefanie Woodward (Meta)
Convenors: LimnoTech, GWP, Noverram
The World Water Week 2026 theme is “Water for People and Progress,” where the “focus [will be] on how to build a more just and equitable water-secure future for people and the planet in a rapidly changing climate.” SIWI has noted that the week is “shaped by hundreds of convening organizations, driving positive change in a collaborative effort through capacity building and knowledge sharing.” Our LimnoTech team looks forward to continuing discussions and taking bold actions with our partners and collaborators to tackle these water and climate challenges.
For more information on World Water Week, go to https://www.worldwaterweek.org/.
Online participation is free. Event registration information can be found here.
If you want to learn more about LimnoTech’s participation in World Water Week, our role in the work described in the above sessions, or our contributions to corporate water stewardship, please reach out to Laura Ziemelis at lziemelis@limno.com or Gregg Brill at gbrill@limno.com.
