The Resilience Shift announces water resilience partnership

This marks the first Strategic Partnership that The Resilience Shift is establishing within the water, energy, transport and digital communications sectors as part of its aim to scale up global activities to accelerate a shift towards more resilient infrastructure.

In an uncertain and complex world, resilience matters and The Resilience Shift’s mission is to help ensure the safety and continuity of the critical infrastructure and services that make our lives possible.

Seth Schultz, Executive Director, The Resilience Shift, said, “We are delighted to launch this partnership with AGWA and bring them on board as the first of our four Strategic Partners. Their expertise in the water sector, coupled with their global network of partners, enables us to focus on our primary role as the catalyst for resilience across the whole of infrastructure, acting as the ‘connective glue’ across and between all sectors and systems.”

“Together we envisage some exciting collaborations and deeper ways to engage with each other and scale up our shared aims of a safe, sustainable and resilient future.”

The Resilience Shift and AGWA are united by a shared sense of urgency to address global drivers and issues of resilience and critical infrastructure. The partnership builds on their desire to collaborate on mechanisms to advance resilience implementation and the level of understanding around water and resilience more broadly.

Bringing together The Resilience Shift’s expertise on resilience with AGWA’s deep network on sustainable water resources management and climate change adaptation is a distinct opportunity to accelerate and amplify resilience policy, practice and learning across the water sector value chain, and where it interfaces with other sectors.

Through the co-creation and co-delivery of projects, reports, media campaigns, events, and fundraising, this partnership will help to grow a global resilience community of practice at the interface of water and resilience.

The two organisations have engaged before, together with other partners in the water sector, to support the roll out the City Water Resilience Approach into the global water community and embed the principles and practices of urban water resilience into global policymaking.

John Matthews, Executive Director and co-founder of AGWA, said, “The language of resilience has become the language of progress, momentum, and positive movement — perhaps even our zeitgeist. Elevating and formalising our relationship with The Resilience Shift was an easy decision, because it excels in this higher vision of how resilience can connect and organize sectors, institutions, and investments. And we believe water flows through the veins of the resilient body.”

“AGWA is in a period of rapid transition and the issues that we’ve been working on for a long time are now of widespread interest. Through the conversations we’ve had with The Resilience Shift, now formalised in our Strategic Partnership, there is close alignment in what we see as the major new issues to tackle and engage on together.”

"We are very excited by the opportunities created through this partnership.”