As industrialisation, digital infrastructure and climate pressures reshape demand, companies are being pushed to look beyond how much water they consume and ask whether the wider systems they depend on can sustain long-term growth.
Investors need a clearer way to measure and value resilience as Asia faces rising climate risks, according to Singapore's financial regulator, with the absence of a common metric making adaptation harder to finance at scale.
The warning has gained urgency as Indonesian haze reaches the Philippines, where such episodes have historically been less frequent than in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
Meteorologists say emergence of a strong El Niño climate phenomenon is increasingly likely this year, as ocean temperatures in June reached a record high.