Lauren Enright

Lauren Enright spends her days on a problem most people never notice: a company can announce it "saved water" and mean almost anything by it. One firm saves half a litre, another saves thousands of cubic metres, and both put the same green claim on the same slide. Enright's job at SCS Global Services is to end that ambiguity, and the tool she built to do it is SCS-116, a certification standard for water stewardship and resiliency that she co-authored and now runs as Program Manager. The whole point of it is to take a fuzzy promise and force it onto a scale you can audit.

SCS-116 launched in June 2024, and the way Enright describes it, the structure is deliberately simple. Tier 1 measures a site's baseline water performance against local, place-based data, Tier 2 is the year-over-year monitoring that proves the company is actually improving and not just reporting once, and on top of that sit what her team calls "Trailblazers", extra leadership claims for things like nature-based solutions, water circularity and bringing in innovative technology. SCS Global Services is not a startup doing this, by the way: it is a third-party certifier that has run standards since the early 1980s, from forestry to sustainable seafood, so water stewardship is the newest room in a very old house.

Lauren Enright's argument for why a standard is needed now is the sharpest thing she says, and it is a comparison to ESG, the environmental, social and governance scoring that companies live and die by. She puts water stewardship right where ESG sat in the early 2000s: malleable, hyped, and about to be scrutinised hard. She is careful to stay neutral about it, naming the Alliance for Water Stewardship (whose standard she trained in back in 2016), the WWF and the various ISO efforts as peers rather than rivals, because she saw the same gaps across all of them and decided the answer was a better instrument, not a louder opinion. The audited facts behind these episodes, by the way, come from my Leviathan water database, and you can read how I source them on my methodology page.

Lauren Enright did not arrive in water through engineering or hydrology. She got there sideways, with a master's in international relations and maritime security, years inside the crisis and security consulting world, and a serious habit of mountaineering and ice climbing. That last part is not a footnote, because she also founded her own venture, Axiom Climate, which comes at the same problem from the opposite end. Where SCS-116 makes water measurable for companies, Axiom Climate tries to make water felt for people, using lived experience with ice and mountains to get the public to care. She tells the story of a museum exhibit her team built, a deliberately basic "icebox", and how parents kept coming back to say their kids wanted to return to it and now talk about water differently. Her line is that "tangible experiences create memories", and that those memories are how you make an unrelatable subject like water finally land.

Lauren Enright thinks the field is heading past water itself. She argues that over the next two to five years companies will stop obsessing over water metrics in isolation and start asking how a healthy watershed actually works as a whole, biodiversity, circularity and all, because right now, in her words, "we're so focused on water" that we are missing the bigger system around it. She believes the long-awaited wave of investment into water technology is genuinely coming, but she is realistic that it usually waits for regulation to push first, which is a very on-brand thing for someone whose entire job is turning soft intentions into hard, checkable commitments.

“Water stewardship had become in the last 10 years really focused on its exploratory methods. It was never sort of ingrained in hard best practices, just like ESG was piloted in the early 2000s. And I believe water stewardship is right in that realm of it being malleable, it being scrutinised, it being uplifted.”

Lauren Enright is, in short, an auditor with a climber's eye: someone who can hold the spreadsheet and the watershed in the same conversation, which is most of why a measurement standard for water finally feels like it has teeth.