Although corporate social responsibility in general and corporate water stewardship specifically are of increasing concern to businesses, investors are lagging behind in fostering water sustainable investment practices – despite the large impact their investment decisions have on the state and shape of tomorrow's water resources. This paper is the first-ever study to assess whether and how investors include water sustainability criteria in their investment decisions, by scrutinizing their publicly released policies on the topic. We hereto (1) developed an assessment framework using the water footprint concept, (2) applied it to twenty large investors in a case study for the Netherlands, and (3) ranked them accordingly. We found that, by and large, water sustainability is a blind spot to investors, resulting in disclosed policies being neither well-demarcated nor clearly formulated, especially regarding the supply chain of the activities invested in. There is a long way to go before investors can ensure efficient, sustainable and fair water use in their investment policy, but our framework helps investors direct their urgently needed improvement process, to transition toward water sustainable production systems in a circular economy.

尽管一般企业的社会责任和企业水资源管理尤其受到企业的关注，但尽管投资者的投资决策对未来水资源的状况和状况产生了重大影响，但在促进水可持续投资实践方面仍落后于人们。本文是有史以来的第一项研究，旨在通过审查针对该主题的公开发布的政策，评估投资者是否以及如何将水资源可持续性标准纳入其投资决策。我们在此（1）使用水足迹概念开发了一个评估框架，（2）在荷兰的案例研究中将其应用于20个大型投资者，（3）对其进行了排名。我们发现，总体而言，水的可持续性是投资者的盲点，