Researchers Urge Prevention-First Approach to the Human Right to Water

"At this stage of our climate crisis, prevention is an inevitable strategy for an era of water inadequacy for present and future generations," said Desierto, a professor of law and global affairs. "We need more proactive approaches in order to realize the human right to water and the related right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment."

What does context have to do with it?

The proposed approach links water security (reliable access to adequate, safe water) and governance conditions to the challenge of delivering clean water as a human right. Context, Adams insists, is critical, because communities hold different views of what counts as harm.

"Water is never just water," said Adams, who is also affiliated with Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative and Eck Institute for Global Health. "When two communities say their right to water has been violated, it doesn't mean the same thing."

For one community, the harm might be mining pollution that contaminates the food supply. For another, it may be water unsafe for mixing infant formula or making tea. For still others, it may be damage to a water site used for prayer, meditation or other cultural and religious practices.

Laws and institutions shape these outcomes too. In Chile, Adams notes, the 1981 water code long treated water as an economic good rather than a cultural one, so a mining company's use could take priority over a community's cultural claim.

How can companies put this into practice?

Companies in water-intensive industries — mining, agriculture, beverage and garment production — can integrate the prevention-first approach into existing due-diligence processes, the routine assessments that examine water risk, stewardship and human rights. Such a move fits the private sector's growing recognition of corporate social responsibility, Adams said.

Adams and other Notre Dame researchers presented this framework to the U.N. at a 2022 forum in Geneva, sharing a design aimed at helping communities realize their water rights. The project now includes a dashboard that companies can use to assess potential risks before projects begin. Users enter their proposed activities, and the tool maps documented water-security and governance red flags onto a human-rights risk profile — working much like a traffic light to encourage preemptive assessment.

The work was commissioned by the mining company BHP, which had no role in the design, analysis or conclusions of the research.

"This was a way to show that scholars and the private sector can work together, and the U.N. wanted our project to highlight that," Adams said. "These companies already conduct due diligence activities. A mining company, for instance, wants to know how long a project would last and how much of a mineral would be recovered. We want them to take that same analysis and time frame and incorporate the human right to access water."

The researchers stress that engaging business is not an endorsement of any industry. The goal, they said, is coordination among all the actors involved.

"Our interdisciplinary research provides legal, hydrological and environmental guidance for water-intensive activities that can help coordinate prevention by engaging both the public and private sectors," Desierto said.

A future phase of the project would deploy the dashboard in places with proposed water-intensive industrial projects, Adams said. Researchers hope to examine how it performs in practice, and they note it can also serve as a teaching tool.

Where do governments and communities fit in?

Adams describes a better process as intensely consultative, involving communities and national government delegates alongside private companies. For governments, that means consultation and education. States are the guarantors of the right to water, Adams said, but the average policymaker may not know what that entails.

Governance operates at national and communal levels, he said, and consultation often needs to reach beyond a mining site itself — to communities downstream or upstream, and across borders where water is shared.

As the U.N. pushes to accelerate innovation toward universal clean water access, Adams argues that a prevention-first model acknowledging the need to work with both public and private sectors could yield better results than the current, largely reactive system.

"This is a good time for us to take stock and think about what more we need to do," Adams said, "and we think this approach can help protect the human right to water in different global contexts."

Publication details: Marc F. Müller et al., "Realizing the human right to water means moving from remedy to prevention," Nature Water (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00740-8