Levi Strauss & Co. took an unconventional approach to its celebration of World Water Day on Thursday, asking employees to wear the same pair of jeans without washing them for the entire work week.

People in developed countries turn on a water tap a dozen times a day without a thought about how that flow contributes to their life, but in international development, water access is a fundamental premise: Give a community clean water, and you improve quality of life and expand opportunity.

And the ambitions go further: to use Scottish Water’s land for wind-power generation, to export water technology (it already does so, to Canada) and what it grandly calls “water diplomacy”. At one level this seems to mean Scottish Water’s support for the international charity WaterAid, helping with water projects in Africa and other poor parts of the world.

The world's nations achieved a U.N. goal of cutting in half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water five years ahead of the 2015 target...The water target was one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty that government leaders, nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have been working to achieve, with varying success.

On Monday, February 27, 2012, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) hosted a major research conference on Water Diplomacy which sought to address three public diplomacy objectives in the area of water diplomacy: listening, implementation and policy development.