A blue sky. Summer temperatures. The weather is fine, almost too much perhaps. Yesterday in Rennes, the thermometer read 27 °. And 30 ° Tuesday in Languedoc. Boosted by CO2, the planet beats new records every year. Water management everywhere is shaping up to be a hot issue. Source of conflicts or on the contrary, on condition of wanting new forms of solidarity. France, which nevertheless benefits from a privileged situation, is no exception.
Like last year, a whole part of the territory is threatened by drought. The most recent map published by the State Secretariat for Ecological Transition specifies threats. From very likely to possible, more than half of the French territory: from the Center Val de Loire via the Grand Est Region to that of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes could suffer from drought during the summer. Not the West preserved by the presence of the ocean.
Lawyers would speak of a bundle of presumptions as the evidence accumulates. Last year already, thirteen departments had faced water shortages. The climate is no longer an issue. It’s an emergency that needs to be prepared. All sectors are concerned: from agriculture to the very way of building and living in cities facing recurrent heat peaks.
If the water goes bad
For water, we know what to do. The diagnosis was made during the Assizes devoted to this issue and organized between November 2018 and June 2019. And for example, renovating aging infrastructures where leaks can be massive. One liter in five is lost on average on the French network.
It also means tackling waste. France reuses 19,000 m3 every day compared to 800,000 m3 in Italy. In industry, in agriculture, these savings are a lever for competitiveness and for individuals a gain in purchasing power.
Better management of water resources also means focusing on agroecological solutions and preserving groundwater and wetlands. Farmers could gain in remuneration what is spent today in water treatment. Margins exist everywhere, including in the management of European funds “Underused”, underlines the summary document of the Assises de l’eau. Finally, use the mapping of drought risks to redirect agricultural production in certain regions. The necessary hill deductions but also sources of multiple tensions will have to take into account this new mapping. Again, we cannot pretend that nothing is wrong.
If the water is bad, the Earth is bad and the Earth is us. It is therefore on all these macro or micro-economic fronts that we must act, where we are best placed to bring about a change as minimal as it is. And since it is about water, it is up to us to dive, to swim, and to win together the other shore, that of solidarity
, write Michel Camdessus, Bertrand Badré, Ivan Chéret and Pierre-Frédéric Ténière-Buchot in their essay Water , published by Robert Laffont in 2004.
The diagnosis is known. It remains to implement it over time. In this area, French weakness is also political. Three ministers in three years at the Ministry of the Ecological Transition: Nicolas Hulot, François de Rugy, Elisabeth Borne. It’s a lot. Undoubtedly too much to conduct such a crucial public policy.
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