Summary
Ambev, a leading beverage company in South America and one of the largest subsidiaries of AB InBev, is deeply committed to water stewardship across its operations. This case study explores how Ambev used Waterplan’s platform to measure and validate the volumetric water benefits (VWB) of their replenishment and watershed projects in their three high-water-risk basins, aligning with their goal of having a measurable impact in these areas.
The Challenge
Renowned regionally for distributing the beers Brahma, Corona, Spaten and Guarana Antartica, Ambev is one of the largest beverage companies in Latin America. Beverage production is a highly water-intensive process, requiring significant volumes of high-quality water at every stage — from ingredient preparation to cleaning, cooling, and packaging. Over the past two decades, Ambev has made substantial progress in reducing its water footprint, lowering its Water Use Ratio (WUR) by more than 50% since 2002 to reach 2.4 liters of water per liter of beverage. This achievement reflects major operational efficiency gains, but it also underscores the remaining challenge: even with reduced consumption, operations in water-stressed basins still face the risk of water scarcity, making it essential to not only use less water, but also to replenish and restore it in the surrounding ecosystems.
Recognizing the critical importance of water resources to their operations, by 2025, Ambev aims to measurably improve the availability and quality of water for 100% of communities in areas of high water stress. For this, they are working on three pillars: (1) reduced consumption in operations, (2) preservation and recovery of watersheds, (3) access to water. In the last 20 years Ambev has reduced their consumption of water used for production (in liters per liter of beverage produced) by more than 50%. In their priority high-risk basins — identified through internal water risk assessments — they run watershed and forest restoration and conservations projects that, by 2023, had preserved 10,769 hectares of forest and placed more than 1,858 hectares under recovery, adding up to more than 2 million trees planted in priority areas for recharging of springs.
However, managing and measuring the impact of 40+ projects across multiple sites, manually, and without water expertise, presented significant challenges:
Difficulty in measuring volumetric water benefits: Before Waterplan, Ambev did not have a standardized, consolidated system to consistently quantify and validate the water benefits from hectares restored or conserved — instead relying on fragmented data and case-by-case evaluations.
Complexity of consolidating diverse site data: Each project generated data in different formats and update cycles, making it challenging to aggregate results in a consistent and comparable way for company-wide tracking and reporting.
Clear Performance Monitoring
Before working with Waterplan, Ambev’s basin and forest projects in their high-risk areas lacked a unified, scientifically validated framework to translate restored or conserved hectares into measurable outcomes. The challenge was not only technical — involving complex hydrological modeling — but also logistical, given the diversity of project types, geographies, and partners. Each site’s data was stored in different formats, sometimes updated at irregular intervals, which made it difficult to maintain a clear, real-time picture of progress toward replenishment targets.
Waterplan implemented a standardized methodology for monitoring project performance, tailored to each site’s unique characteristics. This included:
Establishing site-specific baselines for water availability and demand.
Applying hydrological models to quantify benefits from forest restoration, conservation, infiltration systems, and community water access projects.
Tracking KPIs such as replenishment volumes, hectares under recovery, and community access milestones, ensuring results reflect both environmental and social impact.
Factoring in climate, soil type, vegetation cover, and watershed dynamics to ensure calculations reflect real conditions.
The platform now consolidates all this data into a single, dynamic dashboard where Ambev’s teams can track both replenishment volumes and forecasted benefits. For example, in the Ceará region in Brazil, monitoring now follows how many people across rural communities are benefitted from Ambev’s stewardship projects.
Consolidated & Transparent Project Data
The introduction of Waterplan’s monitoring and reporting tools transformed VWB tracking from a fragmented, manual exercise into a transparent, repeatable process. Each site’s results are now backed by a full evidence log — including field data, remote sensing imagery, and calculation assumptions — which can be reviewed by internal teams or third-party auditors.
Key features include:
Automated report generation that pulls live data directly from project tracking, eliminating manual compilation errors.
Version history for each project and calculation, ensuring that updates to models, baselines, or field inputs are fully traceable
Integration with Ambev’s sustainability reporting cycles, so results from programs like Watersheds & Forests flow directly into ESG disclosures.
This means that all project information — from replenishment volumes to hectares under recovery and water quality indicators — is now consolidated in a single place. Results are traceable, supported by site-level evidence, and aligned with standardized methodologies, making it easier for Ambev’s teams to organize projects, track changes over time, and integrate progress into their corporate sustainability reporting.
Conclusion
Waterplan’s partnership with Ambev enhanced their ability to monitor and quantify the volumetric benefits of their water stewardship projects, supporting progress toward basin-level targets. By providing a digital platform for data management, VWB monitoring, and exportable reports, Waterplan enabled Ambev to make data-driven decisions by closely monitoring progress against targets and estimating VWB results. Projects calculated and validated with Waterplan contributed to measuring the impact of projects across high-water-stress basins, where Ambev is already seeing measurable improvements in water availability and quality. With all project information consolidated and traceable, Ambev is better equipped to demonstrate progress toward its 2025 goal of delivering measurable impact in priority basins.
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