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Serious threats
This bill poses serious threats to French citizens? access to clean water, while also limiting the agricultural sector?s ability to effectively adapt to climate and environmental challenges. In this context, local governments, citizens, farmers, and water users would all lose out.
In France, one-third of the 33,000 drinking water intake facilities supplying 67 million people already show concerning levels of pollution, and for 16 million people, these levels are projected to exceed quality thresholds by 2024. In nearly 90% of cases, this contamination is linked to pesticides, their metabolites, or fertilizer derivatives. Each year, about 100 water sources are abandoned or closed due to pollution that is technically impossible to treat or whose treatment costs are deemed too high.
A stalemate
The costs of pollution cleanup continue to rise, putting many local governments in a bind. Faced with regulatory requirements, they have fewer and fewer financial and regulatory tools at their disposal. At the same time, the reduction in support for the agricultural sector to change practices related to water catchments is undermining their ability to develop balanced solutions that reconcile economic activity, public health, and resource conservation.
Furthermore, 95% of French departments have already had to impose water use restrictions in recent years under drought decrees, a trend that is expected to worsen according to available projections.
Several major setbacks
However, the bill to be considered by the Senate starting on June 29 introduces several major setbacks for the protection of water resources. Among the main concerns are:
- the reintroduction of banned pesticides, which poses risks of contamination of water bodies, as well as risks to health and biodiversity;
- the weakening of policies to protect drinking water catchments, to the detriment of local partnerships between local governments and willing farmers;
- the weakening of the tools that enable local governments to take timely action to protect water resources, even as they are on the front lines in dealing with growing pressures on those resources.
The signatories of this statement are calling for a broad-based effort to preserve an ambitious, coherent, and effective water policy that serves all users and the public interest.
