The latest freshwater science-based targets focus on three key issues: water use, specifically withdrawals from surface water bodies and groundwater, freshwater pollution resulting from nitrogen and phosphorus application, and the ecotoxicity impacts of pesticide use.

These pressures are addressed by freshwater science-based targets because of their relevance to the majority of companies (freshwater use), their significance in specific sectors and environmental issues (freshwater pollution and ecotoxicity impacts), and together are three of the key pressures that are driving the loss of nature in ecosystems around the world.

Excessive water withdrawals reduce water volumes in the environment, which negatively impacts aquatic ecosystem resilience and decreases the capacity of the environment to sustain plant and animal life.

• Surface Water: Your surface water targets are calculated to ensure the maintenance of environmental flows. These are the minimum necessary water flows required to sustain ecological processes, safeguard aquatic habitats, and meet the specific survival needs of freshwater species.
• Groundwater: Dedicated groundwater targets safeguard broader freshwater connectivity by averting long-term aquifer depletion. Limiting groundwater pumping helps protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems by ensuring water levels remain dynamically stable and do not drop below the rooting depths of the vegetation that relies on that water to survive.

• Nutrient Targets: Nutrient pollution (excess nitrogen and phosphorus) is a major driver of freshwater biodiversity decline because it leads to eutrophication. This process triggers the excessive growth of algae and cyanobacteria, which eventually decompose and deplete the dissolved oxygen in the water, leading to the asphyxiation of other aquatic life, the potential release of toxins, and the blockage of sunlight for other aquatic plants. By acting on your nutrient targets, you ensure that local nutrient concentrations remain strictly below the maximum allowable limits that trigger these harmful algae blooms. This explicitly avoids the biotic homogenization of the ecosystem and protects vulnerable freshwater species from oxygen depletion.
• Pesticide Targets: The pesticide targets introduced in Version 2.0 focus on reducing your pesticide impact on freshwater ecosystems, phasing out Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs), and engaging in landscape initiatives that address pesticide impacts collectively. Pesticide targets are directly tied to aquatic ecotoxicological effect data, meaning they are explicitly designed to measure and reduce the toxicity impact and harm that chemical mixtures have on aquatic species. Acting on these targets directly aligns your company with Target 7b of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for reducing the overall risks from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half to protect biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

Acting on your Freshwater targets directly addresses some of the most critical threats to freshwater ecosystems—excessive water withdrawals from rivers and aquifers, and pollution from nutrients and pesticides—by keeping your company’s pressures within scientifically defined ecological limits.. By bringing your water withdrawals and pollutant loads within these specific ecological limits, you are directly mitigating the drivers of ecosystem degradation and creating the conditions for freshwater species to recover and thrive.

While biodiversity is not always treated as an explicit, separate metric in the Step 3 target-setting process, the health of freshwater systems and their biological diversity are inextricably interlinked. Therefore, biodiversity is fundamentally embedded within the environmental thresholds that dictate your target ambition levels.