The Minister for the Ecological Transition will soon give his recipe for dealing with the drought. The government’s plan to improve water management will be published “in a few days” and will be “very complete”, indeed promised Saturday Christophe Béchu, against the backdrop of a record rain deficit in France.
This “Water plan”, the result of work launched in September but whose presentation scheduled for the end of January had been postponed, “is ready, it has been finalized”, declared Christophe Béchu, guest of TV5Monde. Emmanuel Macron had pleaded, during the Agricultural Show, for this program to constitute a real “water sobriety plan” on the model of the “energy sobriety plan” launched to contain the effects of the war in Ukraine.
Fight “against all types of waste”
This plan, supposed to draw lessons from the historic heat wave of the summer of 2022, “is very comprehensive, it includes around fifty measures, it deals with sobriety, quantity, quality, financial means, governance added the minister, without going into details. If he alluded to a few leads, Christophe Béchu did not specify whether these measures would be coercive or incentive.
“We must fight against all types of waste including leaks”, “pay attention to the duration of a shower, to the way in which we let a certain number of taps run”, he indicated. The Minister also mentioned “transition models on the industrial and agricultural levels” and the need to “look at the water sources that we have forgotten are available to us”, namely “wastewater, gray water and even rainwater.
Six departments in the south of the country have already been placed on partial drought alert, an exceptional situation so early in the year. Some 80% of groundwater tables in mainland France were at lower than normal levels in February, according to data from the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research, compared to less than 50% in February 2022.