The government’s plan to improve water management, a resource threatened by droughts and global warming, will be presented this Thursday, according to the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu. This Water plan was initially scheduled for January 26, then it was postponed and several times announced as imminent. Around fifty measures are supposed to draw lessons from the unprecedented crisis of 2022.
“This plan will deal with quantity: how do we do with less [and] quality – we only have 44% of the water bodies in France that are in good ecological condition”. Also, “we are going to talk about governance because today we have a rather Kafkaesque system on management, and then we are obviously going to talk about means because there is no plan if there is no of finance, “summarized the minister, on France Inter. Christophe Béchu alluded to a change in the drilling regulations, because “today you can drill and take thousands of cubic meters with sometimes very few authorizations”.
Another announced aspect of the plan: the fight against waste. Currently, about “one in five liters of drinking water leaks”, and even one in two liters in some territories, “it’s just not possible”, added the minister. The plan also provides for measures to increase the rate of reuse of wastewater, less than 1% in France against 8% in Italy, 14% in Spain and even 85% in Israel.
The Eau plan includes an agricultural component, at the very time when thousands of people gathered in the Deux-Sèvres department, to demonstrate against the “basins”, vast reservoirs dedicated to the irrigation of crops, disputed by ecologists and part of the agricultural world. Of an average of 200 billion cubic meters of water available per year in nature in mainland France, about 30 billion are withdrawn, including 3.2 billion by agriculture, mainly for irrigation, far behind the cooling of power plants. (more than 15 billion) or the production of drinking water (5 billion).
After a scorching summer of 2022 and a sparsely rained winter, some 80% of underground water tables in mainland France were at levels below normal in February, according to data from the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research, compared to less than 50% in February 2022. These heat and drought anomalies are no longer isolated events but are repeated in a shorter timeframe and with greater intensity, illustrating the forecasts of the IPCC, the UN climate experts, on the consequences of global warming caused by the ‘human activity.
