The government has promised a plan to improve water management as France goes through a period of historic drought.
By Valentin Dechambre for Le Point
© Richard BRUNEL / MAXPPP / PHOTOPQR/THE MOUNTAIN/MAXPPP
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Lhe government 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 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 we do with less” and “quality – we only have 44% of the water bodies in France which are in good ecological condition”. Also, “we are going to talk about governance because today we have a rather Kafkaesque system of management, and then we are obviously going to talk about means because there is no plan if there is no finance “, summed up the minister, on France Inter. Christophe Béchu hinted at a change in drilling regulations, because “today you can drill and take thousands of cubic meters with sometimes very little authorization”.
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Waste and reuse
Another announced aspect of the plan: the fight against waste. Currently, approximately “1 liter of drinking water out of 5 leaks”, and even one liter out of two in certain 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.
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The Water 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, contested by ecologists and part of the agricultural world. Out of an average of 200 billion m3 of water available per year in nature in mainland France, about 30 billion is withdrawn, including 3.2 billion by agriculture, mainly for irrigation, far behind the cooling of power stations ( more than 15 billion) or the production of drinking water (5 billion).
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Recurring phenomena
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.
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