WAL Water, Agriculture & Livelihoods
WAL: Fostering Water Resilience, Sustainable Production, Securing Livelihoods And Engaging Communities
PRI is consistently working towards water stewardship to save, store and replenish water, especially in our plant locations, with a stakeholder inclusive approach. We are water positive in our operations with replenishment strategies at extremely high- and high-water risk sites. With our CSR Programs on W.A.L (Water, Agriculture, Livelihoods) vertical, communities in water-stressed areas have adopted a circular approach and eventually have become more resilient in their approach to water use while increasing their disposable income. W.A.L. operates with 4 major aspects of community empowerment :
- Safeguarding year-round access to water to communities: Pernod Ricard India has strategically mapped the water stress at the watershed level of its operations across India. This has enabled the development of contextual programs centered around fostering water resilience with communities, aiming to create surface storage and natural harvesting structures and embedding deep aquifer recharge channels for groundwater replenishment.
- Engaging with various agri communities, W.A.L. initiatives are promoting best community practices for improved production, drought resilience, resource optimization and creating local value chains with focus on creating locally feasible, climate resilient and low-cost approaches to provide scale to the productivity of crops with specialized ‘package of practices’
- A key cohort that W.A.L. seeks to empower are the small, marginal and tribal farmers of India by helping them to go beyond subsistence farming. Encourage farming communities to institutionalize Natural Resource Management as a core component of agricultural livelihoods and seasonal cycles
- Through WAL, focused efforts are made to empower and enable rural women to step out of 4 walls, take ownership and develop better decision-making power and rights in livelihood activities and social disclosure. Women as a key cohort move beyond the level of being mere beneficiaries and emerge as thought leaders and change makers. They are not only working towards increasing their disposable incomes, but also driving social change withing rural communities