The government’s plan to improve water management, a resource threatened by droughts and global warming, will be presented “Thursday”, assured Monday the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu. “The plan is complete” and “I will have the opportunity to present it on Thursday”, declared the minister, invited by France Inter and questioned about this Water plan, initially planned for January 26 then postponed and several times announced as imminent .
“The bottom line is the fact of ending up with global warming which forces us to think about sobriety in the water”, recalled Christophe Béchu, citing climate experts who estimate “between minus 10 and minus 40%” of water availability in France in the coming decades. “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 fairly Kafkaesque system on 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.
Fight against leaks
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”.
Another announced aspect of the plan: the fight “against waste”. Currently, around “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.
Very low groundwater levels
Saturday, on France Info, Christophe Béchu had also stressed that this Water plan would include “an agricultural component”, at the very moment when thousands of people gathered in the department of Deux-Sèvres, to demonstrate against the “basins”, vast reservoirs dedicated to the irrigation of crops, contested by ecologists and part of the agricultural world. The demonstration turned into a confrontation which left dozens of injured on the side of the police and demonstrators, with a member of the procession between life and death on Sunday.
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.