The dry banks of the Loire in Montjean-sur-Loire, near Angers, on February 26, 2023 (AFP/Archives/JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER)
The water sobriety plan will be published “in a few days” and will be “very complete”, promised the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu on Saturday, against the backdrop of a record rain deficit in France.
This plan, requested by President Emmanuel Macron on February 25 during a visit to the Agricultural Show, “is ready, it has been finalized”, declared Mr. Béchu, guest of TV5Monde.
This plan “is very complete, 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, Mr. 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.
He also mentioned “transition models on the industrial and agricultural levels” and the need to “look at the water sources which we have forgotten are available to us”, namely “wastewater, gray and even rainwater”.
Mr. Béchu repeated that the consumption of the French was “149 liters of drinking water per day and per person”.
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.
“We came out of summer (2022), given the drought, with a historically low level of groundwater, we had an autumn which did not particularly recharge the groundwater and we had a catastrophic month of February” , summarized Mr. Béchu on Saturday.
© 2023 AFP
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