Water is becoming scarcer due to global warming. To cope with the drying up of this natural resource, the Court of Auditors estimated on Monday in a report that it is absolutely necessary to reduce our consumption. “A determined strategy for reducing water withdrawals and rational use of the resource is the only one likely to provide a long-term solution,” she believes.
It tempers the hopes placed in technical solutions that are too “expensive” or of limited scope, such as the desalination of seawater or the reuse of wastewater – one of the tracks of the Water plan presented by Emmanuel Macron at the end of March. On the other hand, it encourages “strengthening the control of withdrawal authorizations without delay” and “conditioning the public financing of infrastructures for securing agricultural irrigation to commitments (…) to reduce consumption and withdrawals”.
Progressive pricing
The Elders of rue Cambon also call for an in-depth review of water policy, which should be simplified and better follow the geography of watersheds, as already recommended in March in its annual report. Until now, the latter “has essentially consisted in organizing the distribution of water between its various users”. It “must henceforth become a policy for the protection of a common good”, underlines this new report.
This will involve progressive pricing “wherever possible” to “encourage heavy consumers to change their behavior”. This measure has been implemented on an experimental basis for individuals for a few years or months in certain municipalities (Dunkirk, Montpellier, Besançon, etc.). It is one of the main measures of the Water plan but it should be limited to households.
Less and less renewable water in France
However, for the Court of Auditors the fee on water withdrawals “is unfairly distributed between households and other uses”. It is “supported up to 75% by individuals who represent only 16.4% of the samples”, she underlines. More generally, the magistrates consider that the public financing of the water policy is “poorly known” and should be modified “to take into account the pressure actually exerted on the resource by the main uses (drinking water supply, irrigation and industry).
In metropolitan France, the quantity of renewable water available fell by 14% between the period 1990-2001 and 2002-2018, due to rising temperatures, notes the Court. And “nearly 11% of groundwater bodies are subject to excessive abstraction”.