Europe is wasting water, agency warns

By Fiona Harvey in London
Published: March 17 2009 23:01

Europe is running out of fresh water and “living beyond its means” by overexploiting water supplies, the head of the European Environment Agency warned on Tuesday.
A dried-up Spanish reservoir near Barcelona. When the reservoir was created, only the bell tower of the old church was visible above the waterEuropeans are extracting too much from rivers, lakes and underground water sources, which can take millennia to be replenished, according to an EEA report published at the World Water Forum in Istanbul. This has so far disguised the continent’s water shortage, but it is only a stop-gap as supplies will run out.
Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Union’s environmental watchdog, said: “The short-term solution to water scarcity has been to extract ever greater amounts of water from our surface and groundwater assets.”

She warned that the ill effects were beginning to be felt. “Overexploitation is not sustainable. It has a heavy impact on the quality and quantity of the remaining water as well as the ecosystems which depend on it.”
The report found that at least 11 per cent of Europe’s population and 17 per cent of its territory had been affected by water scarcity in recent years, and put the cost of droughts in Europe over the past 30 years at €100bn ($130bn, £93bn).
Cyprus and Bulgaria came out worst in a “water exploitation index” ranking in the report, which compares countries’ water supplies with their water use. Italy, Spain, Macedonia and Malta were also found to be exploiting a worryingly high proportion of their water resources.
The report also noted that some regions within countries have more serious problems: in Spain, for instance, the river basins of Andalusia and Segura are severely low in water.
Climate change is likely to exacerbate droughts. Scientists have forecast that much of southern Europe would become a desert if temperatures were to rise by 4ºC. However, other regions will not escape: climate change will also result in heavier floods, which themselves pose problems for water supplies as they can overwhelm reservoirs, sewers and other water infrastructure, and devastate agriculture.
Already, marked differences can be seen across Europe, with dry areas becoming drier and wet areas becoming wetter in the past century.
Prof McGlade said the only answer was to use water more sensibly across Europe, as far too much water was wasted. “We have to cut demand, minimise the amount of water that we are extracting and increase the efficiency of its use,” she urged.
One way of cutting wastage is to treat sewage to return it to drinking water quality. This “provides a dependable water supply relatively unaffected by periods of drought or low rainfall”, says the EEA. But Europe has failed to invest in treating wastewater, with only 2.4 per cent of effluent being recycled in this way.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009