Deloitte’s Josette Soh: Water stewardship must be a value-chain conversation

She highlights that water risk is not just one risk, and that organisations should prepare for several emerging risks to strengthen long-term water resilience.

As climate change intensifies issues within the water sector, governments, utilities, and businesses are accelerating investments in water conservation, recycling, and smart technologies. Asia Pacific’s growing focus on sustainable water management is not only helping safeguard critical resources for future generations, but has also been driving innovation and supporting long-term economic growth. 

Josette Soh, Sustainability & Specialized Assurance Partner, Deloitte Singapore, offers her valuable insight on this trend. With more than 19 years of experience in professional services, she has advised organisations across Southeast Asia on sustainability and climate-related matters, helping businesses navigate evolving regulatory requirements whilst integrating sustainability into strategy, governance, risk management, and financial reporting.

Her advisory experience spans sustainability and climate reporting, greenhouse gas accounting, climate-related financial disclosures, ESG assurance, double materiality assessments, sustainability strategy, decarbonisation planning, and sustainability governance across a diverse range of industries.

At the same time, her practical, finance-led approach has enabled organisations to translate evolving sustainability requirements into meaningful business outcomes whilst balancing commercial priorities with stakeholder expectations.

As one of the esteemed judges at the Asian Water Awards 2026, Soh explores how organisations can adapt and remain resilient in an increasingly water-constrained future, and examines the role of innovation and emerging technologies in addressing water-related challenges, highlighting the key risks businesses must anticipate as water issues grow more complex.

As organisations now recognise water as both an environmental and business issue, how can they better integrate water stewardship into their overall corporate strategy?

The starting point is recognising that water risk isn't one risk — CDP frames it usefully as three distinct categories: too little water, too much water, and polluted water. Each hits a business differently, whether that's production downtime from drought-driven rationing, flood damage to facilities and logistics, or reputational and regulatory exposure from effluent discharge. A generic "water policy" statement cannot address any of them properly, so the first step is a proper site-level risk assessment, because water risk is fundamentally local — a facility in a water-stressed part of Vietnam faces a completely different exposure than one drawing from an abundant catchment in another part of the region.

From there, the organisations that do this well treat water the way they've learnt to treat carbon: they measure it, they set targets against a credible baseline, and more importantly, they extend that thinking into the supply chain. CDP's data consistently shows that companies' largest water impacts sit outside their own four walls, in agriculture, manufacturing, and other upstream processes. So water stewardship has to be a value-chain conversation, not just a facilities-management one.

The other shift I'd point to is governance. Water needs an executive owner and a line into enterprise risk management, sitting alongside climate risk rather than as an isolated initiative.

How does innovation and technology help organisations build greater resilience against water-related challenges?

Technology is changing what's possible on both the measurement side and the response side, and I'd separate the two.

On measurement, IoT sensors, satellite-based hydrological monitoring, and AI-driven forecasting now let companies see water risk with a precision that simply wasn't available a few years ago, down to a specific facility's exposure to drought probability or flood return periods, rather than relying on generic regional risk scores. That precision matters enormously for capital allocation decisions: it's the difference between spending on resilience where it's actually needed versus spreading investment thinly across an entire portfolio.

In response, we're seeing real progress in water reuse and treatment technology — advanced membrane filtration, closed-loop industrial water systems, and decentralised treatment that reduces a facility's dependence on stressed municipal supply. Singapore is a useful proving ground here, given the national experience with NEWater and desalination, and a number of the treatment innovations refined for that context are now being exported regionally.

The other technology dividend is in the reporting itself. Digital water accounting platforms are making it far more feasible for companies to meet the kind of granular, value-chain-inclusive disclosure that frameworks like CDP and Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) increasingly expect. That used to be a painful manual exercise, and it's becoming much less so.

Having worked with organisations across Southeast Asia, what distinguishes companies that successfully embed sustainability into decision-making?

The clearest distinguishing factor is whether sustainability sits inside the core investment and risk decision process, or whether it sits beside it. In companies that do this well, a capital expenditure proposal or a new facility siting decision automatically carries climate and sustainability risk data alongside the standard financial case. These form part of how the numbers get built, not a separate sign-off appended at the end.

The second difference is whether sustainability goals are actually connected to financial performance, in terms the finance team understands. This is the idea behind Deloitte's own Sustainability Fusion framework: it takes a sustainability project — say, a water-recycling upgrade — and runs the same financial checks a company would run on any other investment: how much money will it save or make, how long until it pays for itself, and how does the return compare to other ways the company could spend that money. That way, the project gets judged on its actual value, not treated as a "nice to have" that gets waved through with less scrutiny, or dismissed too quickly because nobody ran the numbers properly.

Third, and related to that, is being honest about what can and can't be measured. Some benefits are easy to put a number on, such as energy saved or water reused. Others, like improved brand reputation or long-term risk reduction, are real but harder to quantify. The best companies are upfront about that difference instead of either overstating the numbers or ignoring the harder-to-measure benefits altogether. They also compare projects side by side — cost, environmental benefit, and strategic importance — so leadership can confidently choose where to spend money first, rather than funding things on good faith and hoping it works out.

And finally, cross-functional integration, meaning that sustainability, finance, risk, and operations work from one shared data set rather than three different narratives that don't reconcile. Southeast Asia's more successful companies here have generally invested early in that shared data foundation, which pays off considerably once regulatory reporting requirements tighten.

What emerging risks should organisations begin preparing for today to ensure long-term water resilience?

The macro backdrop is sobering — the UN projects a substantial global shortfall between water supply and demand by 2030, and Southeast Asia's combination of rapid urbanisation, agricultural intensity, and climate variability puts parts of the region squarely in the path of that gap. There are a few specific risks I'd flag for business leaders:

Transboundary water competition is becoming more material, particularly around shared river systems where upstream infrastructure decisions in one country affect downstream availability in another. That's as much a geopolitical and supply chain risk as an environmental one.

Next, regulatory catch-up is coming. Water disclosure requirements in the region today are not fully comprehensive. For example, Malaysia and Vietnam have some mandatory reporting for listed companies, but coverage is inconsistent and largely limited to direct operations. However, given the trajectory we have seen with climate disclosure, moving from voluntary to mandatory to value-chain-inclusive over a relatively short window, I'd expect water and broader nature-related disclosure to follow a similar path, likely accelerated by TNFD adoption. Companies that wait for the mandate will be starting from behind.

Physical infrastructure risk is another one. Ageing water and wastewater infrastructure in some markets is increasingly exposed to more intense rainfall events, and the resulting flooding or supply interruption, can halt operations for reasons that have nothing to do with a company's own water management.

I would also add stranded-asset risk for water-intensive facilities sited without adequate long-term water risk assessment. A decision that looked sound a decade ago can look very different once local water stress intensifies.

Which innovations or technologies do you believe have the greatest potential to transform water management in the years ahead?

A few stand out to me as having genuine transformative potential rather than incremental improvement.

AI-driven predictive analytics for demand and risk forecasting is probably the one with the broadest near-term impact, because it changes water management from a reactive discipline to a planning discipline. Companies can model water stress scenarios years out and adjust siting, sourcing, and capital plans accordingly, the same way climate scenario analysis has changed carbon planning.

Decentralised and modular water treatment — package plants that let a facility treat and reuse water on-site rather than depending entirely on municipal supply — have real potential in this region specifically, where municipal infrastructure quality and reliability still vary considerably across markets.

Advances in low-energy desalination and membrane technology matter enormously for water-scarce parts of the region, particularly as energy costs for older desalination methods have historically been a major barrier to adoption.

I would also highlight digital twin technology for water systems, which can be used to model an entire catchment, facility, or municipal network digitally to test interventions before committing capital. It's been used in energy and infrastructure, and its application to water management is still relatively early but promising.

As a returning judge for the Asian Water Awards 2026, what emerging themes or priorities do you hope will be reflected in this year's award entries?

Having judged this awards programme before, what I'm hoping to see more of this year are entries that demonstrate measurable, replicable impact rather than one-off pilot projects — solutions that have actually been scaled across multiple sites or exported to other markets, with real before-and-after data to back the claim.

I'd also like to see stronger representation of nature-based and hybrid solutions. These could include wetland restoration, watershed protection, and catchment-level interventions that work alongside engineered infrastructure rather than purely engineered solutions on their own. That reflects where the broader field is heading, with TNFD pushing companies to think about water in a nature-positive frame rather than purely an engineering or compliance one.

Cross-sector collaboration entries would be particularly welcome. For example, projects where a private company has partnered with a utility, a government agency, or a community stakeholder group, because the most resilient water solutions in this region tend to be the ones that don't rely on a single actor solving the problem alone.

Finally, I'll be looking for projects that are harnessing technology in meaningful ways. Whether it's AI, digital twins, advanced sensors or predictive analytics, technology has enormous potential to transform how we monitor, manage and protect water resources. The entries that stand out are often the ones that don't just improve existing processes, but those that fundamentally change how water challenges are understood and addressed.