The global community agreed on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in a UN meeting in September 2015. As of 1 January 2016 and for the coming 15 years the focus is on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with which we aim to eradicate poverty, inequalities and address climate change. Goal 6 is specifically about water; ‘Ensure access to water and sanitation for all’. Pressing global concerns with respect to water exist for the 1.8 billion people whose drinking water is contaminated: everyday 1,000 children die due to diarrhoeal diseases. Water scarcity affects 40% of global population, with 1.7 billion people dependent on groundwater basins where the water extraction is higher than the recharge, and 70% of all water extractions are used for irrigation, while 795 million people are deprived of sufficient food. In this contribution, we review pressures on the global water-food nexus and will argue that in order to make progress on the SDGs we need to focus on innovations in regional water management, especially in remote and under-developed areas. We advocate for and follow the SDG, which involves using a targeted research approach on implementing integrated water resources management at all levels of government, non-government and community organisations. These goals support and strengthen the participation of local communities in improving water management, and extend the call to expand international cooperation and capacity-building of developing countries in water-related issues. We will exemplify this by experiences from two research case studies, ‘Cross-cultural management of freshwater on the resource-constrained island of Milingimbi, NT’ and ‘Integrated water, soil and nutrient management for sustainable farming systems in South Central Coastal Vietnam’. These case studies show that research has an important role to play in science-based innovation of water resources management and has been well supported and taken up by the local communities.