Water becomes a precious commodity in Europe amid the crisis – 05/09/2023 – Environment

Farmer Pepe Gilabert is already facing the reality of an arid future. The soil in his olive groves has the consistency of salt, and this year he only has to harvest 30% of his normal volume of olives.

In the past, his olive plantations were irrigated solely with groundwater reserves, but these reserves are so low that farmers in his area of ​​Andalusia, Spain, are now having to water their trees with tap water.

This year’s severe and early drought means they are now getting only half the water they need. “It’s a devilish spiral,” said Gilabert.

The drought and wildfires that raged across southern Europe this summer are the clearest signs of a complex and deep-seated problem of water scarcity that is getting worse with advancing climate change. “No country in Europe can consider itself safe,” said Xavier Leflaive, who heads the water team in the OECD’s environmental directorate (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

The number and intensity of droughts has been increasing strongly in the EU (European Union), with the areas and people affected rising by almost 20% between 1976 and 2006, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) predicted in 2020 that the global demand for fresh water will exceed the available supply by 56% by 2030 —a difference greater than the 40% predicted in 2009 by the McKinsey consultancy.

Tensions have reached such a pitch in France and Spain that they have erupted between farmers, the continent’s biggest water consumers, and environmental groups. It seems likely that the situation will get even worse in the coming years due to a mix of failed public policies, entrenched interests and accelerating climate change.

Accustomed for a long time to cold winters and constant high levels of rainfall, European policy makers have generally not been very concerned about water supply.

“Most of Europe’s water regimes are still those that prevailed in times of plenty. They need to be reformed now to reflect scarcity,” said Leflaive. “These are very complex reforms and contain political difficulties, but in my view they are essential.”

The impact of this water deficit is acute for the agricultural sector. But it will also hit consumers and other industries, including energy production, as water is needed to cool nuclear power plants and to generate hydroelectric power.

And the problem is not limited to the driest countries in Europe. A mix of local regulations, leaky pipes and extreme weather has turned even the wettest parts of Europe, like Poland or Germany, into “water stress” areas. Belgium, a country known for its cloudy weather, suffers the most water stress in Europe, due to its high population density and poor infrastructure, according to a WRI index published this month.

For Gilabert, on his farm in Andalusia, it’s simple: without water, “we don’t make money.”

Europe is warming faster than any other continent. But this reality has been aggravated by other issues. Water produced by melting snow in the Alps, crucial for the continent’s water reserves, has been dwindling. Compounding the problem, parched soils do not retain enough rainwater, and this is causing groundwater supplies to deplete.

“The difficulty we face is that the groundwater level is going down, because it’s the most readily available source. We’re using it much faster than it’s being replaced,” said Geoff Townsend of water utility company Ecolab. .

Despite concerns about water shortages, distribution is handled so laxly in the EU that an average of 25% of drinking water is lost through leaking pipes, according to industry body EurEau.

According to data from EurEau, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy lead the list of countries with the most leaks. In Rome, for example, 42% of the water is lost in a water supply network that looks more like a sieve and that in some neighborhoods dates back to the Roman Empire. Dry, hardened soil can cause pipes to break or twist, making leaks worse.

In the UK, one fifth of the water supplied is lost every year. Water companies Thames Water and Northumbrian Water said last year that a record summer heat wave, with temperatures reaching 40°C, followed by a cold winter, had caused a huge increase in pipe bursts.

But critics say climate-related problems have been exacerbated by utility companies’ chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. For water executives, leaks mean a waste of not just water, but money. Despite this, identifying and eliminating leaks is difficult.

“All these leaks are what we call ‘water that does not generate income’. We have to produce potable water. That has a cost. You put water in the pipes, and if it doesn’t reach the taps, you don’t receive tariffs on it”, commented Danis Bonvillain, director of EU affairs at water and sewerage group Veolia.

But the OECD’s Leflaive said fixing every leak did not make financial sense and that a rate of more or less 10% water loss was seen as the best case scenario. “To do more than that will be a very large investment and probably not worth it.”

As the water supply is often managed by a patchwork of local companies and municipal authorities, this makes it difficult for policy makers at national or EU level to act. Across the EU, more than 78,000 companies of different sizes work with the distribution, reuse and treatment of water.

Marc Bierkens, a professor of hydrology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, said there are virtually no countries that encourage efforts to conserve water. The Flanders region of Belgium is one of the exceptions; households pay a base rate that increases if they consume more.

Traditionally, water tariffs have been relatively low for European households compared to the cost of energy bills. This limits the cash companies have to carry out vital repairs. In Ireland, there is no tariff for basic household consumption.

According to the OECD, all EU countries except Germany need to increase their annual water spending by more than 25% to comply with EU rules on drinking water and wastewater. Given this, water bills are likely to increase.

“It is well known that the price paid for water does not reflect the true cost of extracting, transporting, using and polluting it,” said Cate Lamb, global director of water security at CDP, which helps companies and authorities monitor their environmental impact.

The industrial body Water Europe recommends that greater emphasis be placed on types of water used for different purposes, such as water recycled for industrial and agricultural use, while rainwater is preserved for drinking. According to the entity, the cost of inaction “will exceed by five times the necessary investment” of the industry to face in advance the risks of water scarcity.

But the problem goes beyond the need for water for drinking, cooking, washing and growing crops. Clean technologies—critical to Europe’s efforts to move away from fossil fuels—also require water.

The Energy Transitions Commission, an industry coalition, says water for power generation, electrolysis of hydrogen, cooling of nuclear power plants and carbon capture could reach 58 billion cubic meters a year by 2050 — roughly twice as much as drinking water consumed today in Europe.

The extraction of critical minerals for the production of electric vehicles and wind turbines could raise this figure by another 4 billion or 5 billion cubic meters per year, according to the entity’s report.

Added to this is an ever-growing network of data centers, which consume large volumes of water for their cooling and humidification systems, along with the demand for high-tech semiconductor manufacturing, which requires “ultrapure” treated water for chip wash. Google’s Saint-Ghislain data center in Belgium consumed 270.6 million gallons of water in 2022, enough to fill 408 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Industries such as food and textiles, which require large volumes of water for processes such as cleaning vegetables or fixing dyes, are also at risk. Mauro Scalia, director of sustainable business at textile industry body Euratex, said solutions for treating water so that it can be reused are neither simple nor cheap.

“The problem is getting bigger and bigger,” said James Leten, senior program manager at the Stockholm International Water Institute. “The main question is how do we adapt to this in a democratic way.”

Hector Llorente, who grows wheat in a cooperative in León, Spain, may have a solution. It uses three different applications, including Climate FieldView, which monitor crop conditions and moisture levels in real time using satellites, in addition to the water supply from the local reservoir. With this, it managed to reduce its water consumption by half and at the same time triple its production.

Llorente has also reduced fertilizer runoff, which can pollute water sources. “Water is powdered gold, so we are using it prudently,” he said, adding that more local farmers were taking an interest in the technology.

But Johannes Cullmann, director of climate and water at the World Meteorological Organization, said not enough farmers in Europe were incentivized to adopt proactive water management because when droughts hit, governments tended to bail them out. with emergency water supply or compensation for lost crops.

Something is already starting to be done about public policy. EU-led rules on water reuse took effect in June, and Brussels required member countries to draw up drought management plans.

French President Emmanuel Macron set the goal of reusing 10% of wastewater by 2030, characterizing it as part of a new plan for “water sobriety”. The UK is considering requiring mandatory water efficiency labels on new toilets and washing machines.

But Ecolab’s Townsend says policymakers are not acting quickly enough. What is crucial, for him, will be to collect data on how and where water is lacking. “A crisis begins long before the taps run out of water,” he said.

^{Translated by Clara Allain}