The Invisible Shareholders:
Children Bear the Cost of Corporate Water Misuse

World Water Day is a moment to reflect on who has access to safe water, who doesn’t, and why. For the world’s children, this is not an abstract question: it is a daily, lived reality shaped in no small part by the decisions of the private sector. 

Every year, boardrooms around the world prepare for water risk. Executives review exposure reports. Investors scrutinise water-stressed assets. Sustainability teams model scenarios in which rising scarcity threatens operations and supply chains. Water, the corporate sector has finally understood, is a material business risk. 

But there is a set of stakeholders who never appear in those boardroom conversations. They hold no shares. They are not invited to annual general meetings. And yet they are the ones who pay most dearly when corporate water decisions go wrong.

They are children. 

A right without a voice 

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is unambiguous. Children have the right to the highest attainable standard of health, to an adequate standard of living, and to a clean and healthy environment.

Water is not incidental to these rights. It is foundational to every single one of them. 

And yet, when a beverage company draws down an aquifer in a water-stressed region, no child impact assessment is required.

When a textile manufacturer discharges effluents into a river that a community depends on, no mechanism exists to measure what that means for the child who drinks from it downstream.

The story of Norsk Hydro’s operations in Barcarena, Brazil, illustrates how quickly the relationship between industrial water use and community wellbeing can turn.

When a leak of chemical tailings from its bauxite refinery affected surrounding communities in 2018, it was the families who relied on local rivers for their survival who paid the price.

Aluminium refining — like many extractive industries — is entirely dependent on water. That dependency makes water not just a resource but a liability.

When things go wrong, the water that sustains operations becomes the vector through which harm travels into rivers, into bodies, and into the futures of children who had no voice in any of the decisions that put them there.

We have seen this story before — made famous through the Erin Brockovich case, in which the contamination of groundwater in Hinkley, California, exposed how industrial water pollution can devastate a community for decades before accountability arrives, with children among those bearing the heaviest long-term health consequences. 

Corporate water governance has matured — the emergence of science-based targets and mandatory climate disclosures has pushed companies to take water seriously. But progress measured in investor protection is not the same as progress measured in children’s wellbeing. 

What the data tells us 

Global Child Forum’s Corporate Sector and Children’s Rights Benchmark — the world’s largest of its kind, assessing 1,806 of the world’s most influential companies in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group — tells a troubling story.

Year after year, the Community & Environment impact area, which covers how companies manage their environmental footprint in relation to children, is among the weakest performing.

Our 2024 benchmark found that Energy & Utilities companies — among the most water-intensive sectors — averaged just 3.3 out of 10. Most companies fail to report on potential or actual negative impacts they have on local communities — and worse, they almost never report specifically on impacts on children (indicator 4.3.2).  

In 2025, only a handful of companies were conducting supplier assessments on community impacts on children. Environmental and social impact remain in silos, and children fall through the gap between them. 

This matters because the regions where children face the most acute water stress are precisely where water-intensive industries operate at scale. The overlap is not coincidental. And children do not cause this. They inherit it. 

What must change 

Modern corporate governance is built on the principle that those who bear risk deserve representation. Shareholders vote. Employees organise. Regulators set conditions. Children can do none of these things.

A child in a water-stressed community in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia has no legal standing in the ESG framework that governs the multinational whose operations affect her watershed. This is a structural omission at the centre of corporate water governance — not a gap at the margins.

Companies operating in water-stressed regions should be required — not merely encouraged — to conduct child-sensitive water impact assessments as part of their due diligence.

Corporate water stewardship targets should include community-level indicators tied to child wellbeing.

The investor community must begin asking not only what is our exposure to water risk? but whose water are we using, and at what cost to whom? 

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights already establish that companies must respect human rights across their operations.

Children’s rights are human rights. The frameworks exist. What has been missing is the will to apply them. 

Children are rights-holders, not externalities. On World Water Day, it is time they had a seat at the table. 

Global Child Forum works with the private sector to advance children’s rights in business strategy, operations, and value chains. Our annual benchmark assesses the world’s most influential companies on children’s rights.