Blue Davos turns water security into an investment and corporate-action agenda

What happened

Water became a prominent cross-cutting theme at the Annual Meeting under the Blue Davos banner. On 21 January, Water.org co-founder Matt Damon announced Get Blue, an initiative designed to mobilize companies and consumers around expanding access to safe water and sanitation.

Forum reporting identified Amazon, Gap, Starbucks and Ecolab among participating companies. The broader ambition is to help scale Water.org’s reach from roughly 85 million people to 200 million by 2030.

Why it mattered

The initiative placed water inside the language of business resilience and investment rather than treating it only as a humanitarian or climate concern. Water stress affects supply chains, food systems, cities, industrial production and household economic opportunity.

The wider Blue Davos programme also highlighted the financing problem. Forum material cited a multi-trillion-euro water-infrastructure gap and noted that private finance currently accounts for only a small share of global water investment.

Water as economic infrastructure

Davos 2026 connected freshwater access, ocean health and corporate resilience through sessions, financing work and new partnerships. Alongside Get Blue, the Forum highlighted work with the UAE ahead of the December UN Water Conference and collaboration with the Water Resilience Coalition.

The result was a broader proposition: water security is increasingly a Climate & Energy, Trade & Investment and corporate strategy issue as well as a development priority.

Image credit and rights

Hero image: public water tap photographed in Coventry, United Kingdom, Picture2025 via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 / public-domain dedication. It is illustrative and does not depict the Davos session.

Editorial note

This story treats Blue Davos and the Get Blue launch as one canonical water-action development. Separate water initiatives will only become additional archive stories where they represent genuinely distinct announcements rather than repeated coverage of the same launch.