Hera : responds to the UN's call and endorses the CEO Water Mandate

The second Italian company to do so, Hera thus confirms its own orientation towards the objectives set out in the UN's 2030 Agenda, re-launching its commitment to a sustainable water resource management, which in the areas served is worth over 110 million in investments per year.

The Hera Group - Italy's second operator in the water sector, with 300 million m³ of water sold and 3.6 million citizens served - now endorses the CEO Water Mandate, the United Nations Global Compact initiative promoted to re-launch the commitment shown by companies to a sustainable management of water resources. Active for years in all areas in which the CEO Water Mandate supports interventions, Hera is the second Italian company to endorse it, after Enel, thus joining over 100 companies distributed across the globe, including Veolia, Suez, Engie and E.On.

The CEO Water Mandate, more specifically, indicates an approach to water services that is subdivided into six focus areas, to which the Group fully adheres. They begin with measures concerning a company's direct use of water and continue with those involving the supply chain, with a further focus area centred around collective action, intended to incentivise collaborations with third parties and thus consolidate good practices. Another focus goes to public policy, to promote sustainable water management in public debate, develop knowledge on the topic and encourage activities related to sector associations. The CEO Water Mandate, furthermore, gives significant value to community engagement, inviting companies to operate in this sense by developing water infrastructures and environmental education initiatives. Specific attention, finally, goes to the issue of transparency, to orient companies towards accurate financial reporting as regards their progress in reaching essential objectives, such as those tied to water.

After recently becoming part of the CE100, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation program that brings together the world's 100 organisations most active in the transition towards a circular economy, and after launching its collaboration with the Global Compact Network Italia, Hera now intends to endorse the CEO Water Mandate. This will confirm the international scope of its operations, which for some time now - as recorded in its sustainability report - have fully respected the path set out by the European Union and the UN's 2030 Global Agenda.

The water sector, moreover, is the area in which Hera has always concentrated the majority of its investments, coming to over 110 million per year - on average - over the last five years. This allows the Group to maintain an over 53,000 km network in good conditions, along with roughly 900 production and purification plants, providing all with safe and affordable drinking water, as guaranteed by over 2,000 analyses per day, and successfully dealing with periods of serious drought, such as the one seen in 2017. One of the strong points of Hera's integrated water service consists in its orientation towards innovation, turning to avant-garde technological solutions based on automation and remote control of networks and plants in order to guarantee a continuous supply and ensure that leakage in its networks remains among the lowest nationwide. This is the context that saw, for example, the implementation of a technique involving satellite research on water leakage that Hera, the first in Italy to do so, developed in collaboration with the Israeli company Utilis, substantially increasing the amount of water recovered. In a collaboration with the National Health Institute, furthermore, Hera is implementing the Water Safety Plans, European protocols for monitoring all phases of the drinking water production and distribution supply chain.

'The challenges involved in water resources must be considered on a global scale', states Stefano Venier, Hera Group CEO. 'This is why Hera intends to continue giving shape to its efforts according to the framework set out by the United Nations. In this sense', Venier adds, 'the CEOWater Mandate represents a valid tool for activation with which companies all over the world can identify, and come together for the future of the planet. After all', concludes the multi-utility's CEO, 'Hera has long been active in all of the focus areas indicated by the mandate, demonstrating its ability to anticipate many of the orientations that the international community has rightly chosen.'