Summertime is disaster time. Wildfires, floods, droughts and heatwaves are as much a part of the holiday period as crowded beaches and empty offices. Since 2018, more than half of Europe has suffered from extreme drought conditions, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Local, regional and national authorities across the European Union are confronting the dangers of persistent water shortages. That can have serious consequences for many aspects of everyday life — from the water we drink to the food we eat and energy we produce.
This summer, months of drought have led to water restrictions in six counties in Romania. Agricultural output has plummeted in what is the EU’s second-largest grain exporter. The Romanian government is planning a bailout of its farmers to the tune of up to €600 million and is considering asking the European Commission for additional financial assistance.
Sicily’s agricultural sector is facing a loss of €2.7 billion. One-quarter of the Italian island’s municipalities are rationing water, as they face one of their worst droughts ever.
In the semi-autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia, water reserves hit an all-time low in February. Authorities there declared a drought emergency, impacting six million people.
“In Catalonia, irrigation is starting much earlier in the year than in the past, which impacts the availability of resources towards the end of the summer,” Rafael Seiz, a freshwater expert for the Spain office of WWF, an environmental group, told The Parliament.
In all, 30% of people in southern Europe face permanent water stress, as climate change impacts the frequency, length and intensity of dry spells and, conversely, rainfall. Rising temperatures also mean faster evaporation — not to mention the need to consume more water.
Climate change just one problem
Cooler and wetter northern Europe is not safe from these dangers, either. Record low water levels have caused Germany more than once in recent years to suspend shipping on the river Rhine, a key logistics artery in Europe. In Finland, lakes and marshes are drying up, threatening the indigenous Sámi.
Climate change is only one of the human-induced problems putting pressure on water supplies. Even without it, Seiz said poor water management bears some responsibility. Overuse has been another factor in the low levels of reservoirs and aquifers — natural stores of groundwater — such as those in Catalonia.
“You cannot depend on rainfall to solve the situation of overexploitation,” he said.
That means climate change now is exposing wrongdoing from the past. Governments are playing catchup as they struggle to adapt to the situation.
“A few years ago, I would never have imagined that water would be a problem here in Europe, especially in Germany or Austria,” Torsten Mayer-Gürr, the head of the Institute of Geodesy in Graz, Austria, told The Parliament.
The institute’s study of satellite data revealed a severe lack of groundwater across Europe. Replacement rates can’t keep up with use — a trend set to increase, according to the EEA. Of the fresh water sources that do exist, just 40% are in an acceptable state, the European Commission found.
“We cannot plan based on how the water cycle behaved in the past because we're moving into very uncertain, uncharted territory,” Sergiy Moroz, a policy manager for water and biodiversity at the European Environmental Bureau, Europe’s largest federation of environmental groups, told The Parliament.
“We were building the wrong infrastructure in the wrong places for a very long time. We were cutting off floodplains from rivers. There has been a lot of mismanagement,” he added.
Less water, bad for business
Water issues are not just a concern for environmentalists. Industry is waking up to how dependent its bottom line is on climate. Given repeatedly low summertime water levels on rivers like the Rhine, some companies are looking into switching to ships that can operate in shallower water.
“But that is very expensive. Only the big companies can afford this for now,” Fabian Spieß, a spokesperson from the Federal Association of German Inland Shipping, told The Parliament.
The EU’s Water Framework Directive has been in place since 2000. Its goal is to achieve “good status” of both surface and groundwater bodies by 2027.
The directive requires EU countries to submit data about the quantity and quality of their water every six years. While Moroz credited the legislation as “groundbreaking” when it came into force, he said implementation has suffered from a lack of political will.
“The initial deadline was 2015. Now a lot of member states are saying they won’t even reach 2027, but need time till 2040 or 2050,” Moroz said. “They’re just shifting the problem down the line.”
The Commission scrapped a new program, the Water Resilience Initiative, before it got off the ground during its last mandate, which concluded this year. Twenty-eight organisations published an open letter condemning the move and called on the Commission to put it back on the agenda.
Ursula von der Leyen has signaled she may do so. Following her re-election as Commission president, she put forward political guidelines that include water security and highlighted the “need [for] a new European Water Resilience Strategy.”
Yet those guidelines are a wish list of priorities, not all of which line up. Hydropower, for example, can go a long way towards meeting the EU's goals of renewable energy and energy independence. It also needs a lot of water.
“Hydropower plants are incredibly invasive and break the natural dynamics. Most of our rivers are already dammed,” Moroz said, adding that the EU should keep its hands off what remains of the bloc's untouched waterways. “Before we start dividing up water for economic uses, we need to make sure we have left enough in the ecosystem for it to continue functioning."
For the European Commission's part, any development of hydropower would have to keep with the EU's “obligations for environmental impact assessments.”
Farmers: Culprits and victims
“The big elephant in the room is the agricultural use of water,” the WWF's Seiz said.
EU support for its agriculture sector accounts for nearly one-third of its current €1.21 trillion multiyear budget. A 2021 report by the European Court of Auditors found that how that money is spent, collectively known as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), is out of sync with the Water Framework Directive.
CAP promotes inefficient water consumption, the report found, with agriculture consuming about one-fourth of freshwater abstraction. Pesticides have also become more problematic. As water levels drop, Seiz said, there is less to dilute them with thus increasing concentrations of pollutants.
That makes farmers victims of their own behavior, as well as the financial incentives that dictate them. The agricultural lobby has resisted environmental initiatives, such as the Nature Restoration Law, which includes an effort to restore 25,000 kilometers of free-flowing rivers across Europe by 2030.
"We have to increase the efficiency of our irrigation systems, which in most areas need modernisation that should be supported with public resources,” Ramon Armengol, a member of the Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives of Catalonia, told The Parliament.
Water solutions, tested in Flanders
In the Belgian region of Flanders, 90% of its surface fresh water is in “less than good” condition, according to the EEA. The possibility of water shortages and restrictions would be a historical irony for Flanders, a coastal lowland that has long suffered from the opposite problem: Flooding from too much water. The drainage infrastructure that has been built up over centuries to deal with that is now backfiring.
“They needed to get rid of the water as fast as possible. Now, the dogma has changed,” Florian Lauryssen, a bioscience engineer at the Flemish NGO, Natuurpunt, told The Parliament.
Climate change has worsened the situation, he said, and what rain does fall might not reach aquifers because so much land is paved over. As a result, the regional Flemish government has implemented “Blue Deal” projects. They include everything from local initiatives to remove garden tiles so the ground can absorb rainfall, to household rainwater collection, to re-naturalising rivers.
The Flanders case shows that solutions do exist, and Lauryssen has noted gradual improvement. Yet the clock is ticking.
“If we don’t act in the next ten years, we will be reaching some tipping points, which will be irreversible,” Moroz, from the environmental bureau, said.