From one calamity to another. After a summer marked in France by episodes of intense drought and highly publicized conflicts over access to water resources, winter is approaching and with it the risk of floods, floods and other extreme events. Risks reinforced by global warming. Water, which was no longer a subject of concern in recent decades, is back at the center of the debates. In question in particular according to Franck Galland, associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, also author of War and Water (Robert Laffont, 2021), a chronic underinvestment for 30 years that needs to be remedied.
L’Express: The drought in the summer of 2022 exacerbated many latent conflicts over access to the resource. The climate crisis is expected to accelerate this phenomenon in the coming years…
Frank Galland: The subject is not black, but it is obviously worrying. We are witnessing a form of acceleration of history. And the episode of the year 2022 shows us that we are going to be faced with periods of long drought over half the year and a rainy/snowy season over the other half. The four seasons of our grandparents are over. And unfortunately, when it rains, it will be exceptional precipitation. Let us recall what happened two years ago on the Vésubie and the Roya. We had a rainfall of 200 millimeters in a few hours. To give you an idea, it rains on average in France 960 mm per year. Cumulations of up to 500 liters per square meter have been observed, which is the equivalent of what can fall in three months. This explains the disaster that followed in the hinterland of Nice. It was a first awakening, and this summer we have just experienced a second on the scarcity of resources.
How to understand this new reality?
We must not resolve to it, we must adapt, and that supposes a wave of massive investments. At the end of the Second World War and until the 1970s, France adopted strategic nuclear planning. But it was also the rise of “large hydraulics” with the canals and dams of the Société du Canal de Provence, which still allow the area concerned to not experience a lack of water. At the same time, the regional hydraulic network was born, conceded to the Rhône Languedoc Basin, which allows from a water intake on the Rhône to supply part of Occitania. It took vision and a lot of investment.
Conversely, in certain regions, we are now taking the full brunt of the lack of resources provided over the past 30 years. This is the case, for example, of Brittany, where 85% of available water resources come from rivers and reservoirs, because the soils there are granitic and offer very little underground water. Against the backdrop of changes in rainfall patterns, this explains the shortages and conflicts of use that we are going to experience, here as elsewhere.
Can the summer we have just experienced constitute an electric shock in the country?
Yes, but everyone must roll up their sleeves, State, communities and operators. Let’s get inspired by models that work. In Israel, for obvious reasons of survival, water has depended for years on the country’s highest security authorities. From a vulnerability, the Israelis have made water a strategic asset to such an extent that Israel now has a surplus and can export it, as well as its technologies, making water a diplomatic and economic tool. In France, we must reconsider the water resource in this respect. The subject begins to infuse. For example, we can welcome the announcement by Elisabeth Borne who wants to make the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region a pilot for the reuse of wastewater in France to increase this share to 10%. Beyond the State, the regions have a crucial role to play because they are in the right mesh to operate the levers, the size of a water basin.
There are things that work very well, such as the Aqua-Valley cluster in Occitanie, which brings out a certain number of technical responses. There is also a need for very strong public-private partnerships, because it is the private sector that drives innovation. As such, it is interesting to see today a group like Veolia, after its merger with Suez, recover an asset like Agbar in Barcelona, which has been able to develop very innovative approaches to the preservation of water resources. Today, France is confronted with a climatic evolution which pushes it towards a semi-arid climate. We therefore have a lot to learn from Spain, which has been confronted with this for 40 years, and has developed a range of solutions in terms of smart irrigation, the reuse of wastewater, or even the desalination of seawater.
Is desalting precisely a question that may arise in France tomorrow?
Nothing should be prohibited. And desalination is already a reality. This summer, a desalination unit was urgently brought to the Ile de Groix in Brittany, to meet the water needs of the population and summer visitors due to the drought. On these islands in the Atlantic or on the Mediterranean coast, this will obviously be part of the solution with increasingly mature and competitive technologies.
But the bulk of the subject for a country like France is the potential for reusing wastewater. Our Spanish neighbors reuse 15% of their wastewater, the Israelis use 90%. In Singapore, which was cruelly dependent on neighboring Malaysia when it gained independence in 1960, the reuse of wastewater already makes it possible to meet 30% of water demand, and it will be 50% by 2060. desalination will provide 25% of Singapore’s water needs. It will therefore be 75% of the country’s needs that will go through alternative technologies, and no longer through a transfer of raw water from Malaysia, which posed real problems of safety, dependence and continuity of water service.
In France, we are not even at 1%. And yet there are good ideas. This is the case, for example, of the Jourdain project in Vendée, which involves reinjecting recycled wastewater into a vegetated area to return to a natural state. It then joins the river to produce drinking water. This is just one example. We can then multiply the reuse modules on the treatment plants. Recycled wastewater can be used to clean trucks and water forest canopies, which would be very useful to us in preventing fires. We can also use wastewater to cool data centers, which is not in vain given the digital explosion, or for leisure activities. It is indeed amazing to continue in France to water golf courses with drinking water. In response to situations of scarcity of the long-term resource in certain areas, let’s face it, we will also have to build new hydraulic reservoirs for low-flow support.
Desalination, reuse of wastewater…Are there other solutions available and deployable on a large scale?
We must also act on demand. We have significant leak rates, up to 20%. But, let’s face it, we have 900,000 kilometers of pipes under our feet, that’s 23.5 times around the Earth, and we’ll never be able to get down to a zero leak rate. But obviously, we can win in the order of 5%. Recall that the objective of the Grenelle II of the environment of 2010, it was 15% of leak rate in the pipes. We are not there. To meet this challenge, we must invest massively in pipes which by definition cannot be seen, because they are underground, but which are essential. Digitization also plays a key role. Thanks to smart sensors and meters, pressure drops and leaks in pipes can be detected preventively.
Beyond drought and water scarcity, climate change will also cause occasional but violent episodes of storms or floods. How to guard against it?
It is clear that there will be more and more emergency situations to manage. The posture must be placed in anticipation and reaction. The implementation of the means of ultimate help must therefore be on the agenda. At operator and State level, rapid intervention forces must be created, based on the model of Enedis’ Electricity Rapid Intervention Force and EDF’s Nuclear Rapid Action Force, which are envied around the world. These trained teams must quickly produce and distribute a substantial volume of drinking water in a disaster area.
When you take the example of Vésubie and Roya, the Régie Eau d’Azur lost around ten critical works for drinking water and sanitation, and 200 kilometers of network due to landslides. We must therefore beef up our operational response capacities, because they are undersized, even if some operators are beginning to have equipment and dedicated teams. This summer, for example, the Veolia teams carried out extraordinary work at Teste-de-Buch. Without their ability to mobilize to provide the water service, the defense against the fire could have been prevented, and most of the water and sanitation works in the Arcachon basin lost, causing a long and painful reconstruction for the tourist attractiveness of the region.
Faced with this amount of investment to be carried out, in the latent context of the energy crisis which is already weakening the capacities of local authorities, isn’t an increase in the price of water inevitable?
It’s obvious. It is customary to say in this profession that water must pay for water. The State and Europe also need to mobilize significant amounts. It is a real Marshall plan for water that should be put in place in France and in Western Europe. We are not starting from nothing, far from it. But the investments and the stakes remain colossal in terms of preventive and curative maintenance of existing structures, rehabilitation of buried pipes, creation of interconnections and emergency plant between unions and operators, including in cross-border logics.
It is also essential to invest in alternative technologies for the reuse of wastewater, artificial groundwater recharge or desalination. It’s a bit like climate change: few decisions have been taken over the past 30 years, and we now have to manage the consequences with the years to come which will be very complicated. Everything that we do not invest and mobilize now, we will pay dearly tomorrow.