The European Water Resilience Strategy, adopted by the European Commission in 2025, reflects a growing awareness that water is no longer only an environmental issue, but a strategic resource for Europe’s economic competitiveness, security and climate adaptation. In this context, the Strategy provides a valuable opportunity to accelerate long-overdue reforms and foster a more adaptive, efficient and sustainable management of water resources. This challenge is particularly pressing for Mediterranean Member States, where increasing water scarcity and climate-related pressures are placing growing stress on water systems. Against this backdrop, the paper highlights a set of priority policy actions. Enhancing water resilience requires a coherent mix of regulatory reform, economic incentives, improved monitoring and coordinated investment strategies capable of aligning environmental objectives with long-term water security
Water as a strategic resource
On 5 June 2025, the European Commission adopted the Water Resilience Strategy (WRS), a document that marks a significant shift in the way the European Union approaches water-related challenges. Far from being a routine policy update, the Strategy elevates water management to a strategic priority, placing it at the heart of EU policies on security, competitiveness and territorial cohesion. Its stated objective is to strengthen and better coordinate the existing EU regulatory framework on water resources, while assigning primary responsibility for implementation to the Member States. In doing so, the Strategy reflects the assumption that persistent implementation gaps can be addressed through enhanced coordination mechanisms, financial incentives and institutional dialogue, rather than through the introduction of new binding legislative obligations.
The Strategy is structured around three main objectives: restoring and protecting the natural water cycle; fostering a more water-efficient economy through conservation and the efficient use of resources; and ensuring universal access to safe and affordable drinking water and sanitation services. These priorities are complemented by five cross-cutting areas of action: governance, investment and infrastructure, digitalisation, research and innovation, and security.
Stakeholder reactions: shared diagnosis, insufficient operational instruments
Following the adoption of the Strategy, debate among key European stakeholders quickly focused on a specific issue: the gap between the document’s level of ambition and the practical instruments envisaged to achieve its objectives.
EurEau welcomed the integrated approach based on the quality-quantity nexus and the strengthening of the WFD, but highlighted the absence of quantitative targets for reducing overall water abstractions and insufficient clarity on source pollution prevention, particularly regarding PFAS. Aqua Publica Europea (APE) acknowledged the Strategy as a significant political signal and endorsed the efficiency principle and the recognition of investment needs, while pointing to a significant gap between ambition and operational measures — stressing that implementation must reinforce public water governance, ensure consistency between environmental objectives and social equity, and avoid transition costs falling on citizens through tariff increases. SGI Europe called for stronger source pollution prevention, fuller enforcement of the polluter-pays principle and a total ban on PFAS, while cautioning against one-size-fits-all approaches that ignore the specific, non-tradeable nature of water as a resource. Water Europe identified digitalisation as the key enabler of resilience, urging the future EU Action Plan on digitalisation to create a “Digital Single Market for Water Data and Operations” based on interoperability, open standards and data sharing. BusinessEurope, approaching the issue from a competitiveness standpoint, welcomed the recognition of water resilience as a strategic factor but flagged the risk that the absence of a structured financial framework could limit the Strategy’s operational effectiveness.
In summary, stakeholders broadly agree with the Commission’s diagnosis of Europe’s water challenges, yet they also concur that the real test will lie in translating the Strategy into concrete investments and clear accountability mechanisms. The agricultural sector has not yet articulated an official collective position, although the European Irrigation Association has welcomed the recognition of water efficiency and water reuse as key priorities.
A phased implementation roadmap
The Strategy is designed around a 2025–2030 timeframe, with a clear sequence of implementation: immediate actions, measures to be launched by 2026–2027, and a final quantitative objective of improving water-use efficiency by at least 10 per cent by 2030, while leaving it to Member States to establish consistent national targets. In its initial phase, the priority has been to put in place the necessary institutional conditions for implementation.
Nearly a year after adoption, implementation appears consistent with an initial phase of institutional grounding rather than full operationalisation. The Commission has operationalised the Water Resilience Strategy Actions Tracker to monitor progress on thirty priority actions, strengthened cooperation with the European Investment Bank through a dedicated water sector financing programme for 2025–2027, and launched preparatory activities for the digitalisation Action Plan. Despite the current geopolitical uncertainty, it is important that the deadlines associated with the Strategy’s priority actions are met without significant delay.
Why Mediterranean countries are most exposed
The framework outlined by the WRS assigns a central role to the capacity of Member States to translate the European strategic framework into operational choices consistent with national specificities. This is particularly relevant for Mediterranean countries, where increasing water scarcity and climate-related pressures compound structural weaknesses: high fragmentation of governance, delays in WFD implementation, still significant levels of network losses, territorial imbalances in resource availability, and growing tensions among civil, agricultural and productive uses. Against this backdrop, the paper identifies a focused set of policy priorities — regulatory, financial and organisational — capable of credibly strengthening water system resilience in the medium to long term. The objective is not to propose a formal transposition of EU guidance, but to select a set of policy levers that can plausibly address historical delays and seize the opportunities opened by the European Strategy.
Reforming water abstraction concessions
The framework of concessions for water abstraction represents one of the structural nodes of water resource governance. A significant share of concessions currently in force dates back many years, often granted under demographic, productive and climatic conditions profoundly different from today’s. In many cases, these titles have not been subject to systematic review, either in quantitative terms or with regard to operating conditions, use priorities and monitoring obligations — a situation increasingly incompatible with the evolution of water demand and the intensification of scarcity phenomena.
The infringement procedure launched against Italy forms part of a broader enforcement trend by the Commission concerning the implementation of the WFD, particularly on the monitoring, review and updating of abstraction permits. In its January 2026 infringement package, the Commission opened proceedings against Denmark, Italy and Luxembourg, noting the absence or inadequacy of mechanisms to reassess permits over time: in Italy, concessions may last 30–40 years without any reassessment obligation. Similar procedures were launched in November 2025 against Poland, and in 2024 against a broader group of Member States — including the Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus, Austria, Slovenia and Finland — for deficiencies in permit review and evaluation cycles.
Taken together, these cases reveal a widespread and systemic compliance gap. The WFD establishes a dynamic governance framework requiring Member States to subject water uses to continuous oversight, ensuring alignment with environmental objectives and basin planning tools. Under Articles 9 and 11 of the Directive, Member States must not only ensure authorisation systems for abstractions, but subject permits to ongoing verification and update their conditions over time, including from an economic perspective. A systematic review of abstraction concessions, coordinated with river basin planning and water balances, is therefore essential to strengthen system resilience, ensure compliance with priority uses, and reduce the risk of unplanned emergency interventions.
Delays in the application of economic principles
Article 9 of the WFD constitutes one of the economic pillars of European water policy. Its full implementation is essential not only for equitable cost distribution among users, but to guide behaviour toward more efficient resource use and to create the financial conditions for investment in a context of increasing climate-related scarcity. The Commission’s WFD Implementation Report 2024 documents structural delays in the substantive application of Article 9 principles — cost recovery, incentive pricing and the polluter-pays principle — with particularly evident shortcomings in monitoring quality, especially in agriculture.
Although economic analysis of water uses is formally included in River Basin Management Plans, the information is often incomplete, insufficiently disaggregated and only marginally used as a decision-making basis. Attention is mainly focused on traditionally defined water services, while other significant uses — irrigation, storage, water reuse — are not adequately analysed. On incentive pricing, the Report highlights the absence in some countries of a systematic assessment of whether tariff policies generate effective price signals for water efficiency. In the agricultural sector, irrigation charges do not always follow an incentive logic; in self-supply situations, even basic measurement and monitoring systems are absent. Without a significant strengthening of monitoring systems and data quality, pricing and cost allocation decisions risk remaining weak and ineffective. The Commission calls for closing this implementation gap by strengthening abstraction monitoring, improving the completeness of economic analysis and revising pricing policies.
Promoting circularity: the role of water reuse
In Mediterranean countries, where structural water scarcity is more acute, wastewater reuse has emerged as a strategic component of water resource management, particularly in agriculture, which accounts for around 65–70% of total water consumption. At EU level, current reuse volumes stand at approximately one billion cubic metres per year, against a technical potential estimated at up to six times higher.
The comparative analysis of European models reveals differentiated but partly converging approaches. Spain has developed reuse as part of a broader portfolio of non-conventional resources alongside desalination, reusing roughly 10–12% of treated wastewater and integrating the practice into basin planning — supported by a structured governance framework and a mix of public investment and regulated pricing schemes. Cyprus and Malta, where freshwater availability is extremely limited, rely on strong public intervention, including subsidies and centrally planned infrastructure, demonstrating that relatively high penetration levels are achievable when supported by strong state coordination. France and Portugal have historically maintained more limited reuse levels, increasingly adopting hybrid governance models combining public co-financing of infrastructure with user tariffs reflecting at least operational costs.
Across these cases, a common feature is the decisive role of economic arrangements as enabling conditions. The diffusion of reclaimed water depends not only on technical feasibility but on the ability to reconcile three interdependent factors: cost recovery for operators, which requires tariffs and/or public support covering at least operational costs; affordability for end users, especially farmers, whose willingness to pay is often below full-cost levels; and competitiveness with conventional water sources, where reuse is often economically viable only where these are scarce, overexploited or increasingly regulated. Wastewater reuse is, ultimately, a policy-dependent resource: its large-scale deployment hinges on the alignment between pricing structures, public investment and institutional coordination across governance levels.
The role of individual consumption measurement
The deployment of smart water metering and the individualisation of consumption in multi-apartment buildings are increasingly recognised as key tools for demand management and water efficiency, directly relevant to the Strategy’s “water efficiency first” principle and its 10% efficiency target. Large-scale evidence from the UK’s Universal Metering Programme shows that the introduction of volumetric pricing produces an average reduction in consumption of approximately 22%, significantly higher than earlier policy assumptions — reflecting a structural shift from passive consumption to price-responsive demand.
A particularly relevant dimension, often underdeveloped in policy frameworks but strongly supported by the literature, is the role of sub-metering in multi-apartment buildings. In collective housing contexts where water costs are shared across users, the absence of individual measurement weakens price signals and generates free-riding behaviour. The introduction of sub-metering, combined with individual billing, enables direct attribution of consumption to end users, facilitates behavioural change, supports continuous monitoring at disaggregated levels and allows early leak detection. Beyond its monitoring function, sub-metering fundamentally transforms governance dynamics within buildings by creating a direct link between consumption, cost and user responsibility.
These findings carry important implications for the European resilience agenda. Individualisation of consumption is a necessary condition for effective demand-side policies, particularly in dense urban environments. Behavioural responses are, however, activated primarily by price signals rather than by measurement per se — making it necessary to combine smart metering deployment with appropriate tariff structures. Careful design is needed to balance efficiency, affordability and equity: where increasing block tariffs are not calibrated to household size, the welfare impacts of metering can be heterogeneous and distributionally regressive. These dynamics underline the need for considered policy design on metering and tariffs to ensure that water resilience strategies are socially as well as technically credible.
Improving governance and ensuring adequate utility scale
A further element complementing the priorities identified above concerns the scale at which water systems are managed. The sector is characterised in many countries by a high number of small and medium-sized operators, often lacking the technical, financial and organisational capacity to address the challenges of the WRS. Large enabling investments — from advanced treatment plants to interconnection infrastructures, digital monitoring platforms and the management of emerging contaminants such as PFAS — frequently exceed the operational capacity of individual small and medium operators, both in economic scale and technical complexity.
Portugal introduced a dual governance model combining local municipal services with supra-local multi-municipal systems, which improved investment capacity in bulk supply and wastewater treatment but did not eliminate significant territorial disparities between coastal and inland regions. France has historically maintained a fragmented structure; despite ongoing consolidation through inter-municipal entities, heterogeneity in performance, tariff levels and investment capacity persists. In Italy, the reform introduced by the Galli Law identified the Optimal Territorial Area (Ambito Territoriale Ottimale) as the appropriate territorial dimension for overcoming fragmentation. Nevertheless, incomplete and uneven implementation has allowed substantial disparities to persist between North and South in terms of service quality, investment capacity and access to EU funding.
All this suggests the need to reflect on the adequacy of the current planning and management scale. ARERA Resolution 639/2023/R/idr has introduced instruments to enable planning approaches extending beyond the scale of the individual operator or single ATO, identifying three cases for which specific cost components may be applied: the construction of large upstream infrastructures; the construction and management of large supra-area infrastructures to address climate change challenges; and the construction of plants that can no longer be deferred in areas where operators lack adequate technical expertise and access to credit. More radical revisions of the sector’s organisational structure would require in-depth institutional and territorial reflection, possibly exploring coordination solutions among existing authorities and operators.
Conclusions
The European Water Resilience Strategy represents a significant paradigm shift: no longer a sectoral policy limited to environmental protection, but a cross-cutting strategic framework intertwining supply security, economic competitiveness, social equity and climate adaptation. The Commission’s choice not to introduce new legislation assigns central responsibility to Member States: water resilience is not built automatically at the European level, but depends largely on national capacity to translate strategic guidelines into concrete and timely reforms.
The priorities identified in this paper share a common thread: the absence of economic signals consistent with the scarcity of the resource. The incomplete application of Article 9, the slow reform of abstraction charges, and the transitional configuration of reuse perpetuate a system in which conventional water remains underpriced, discouraging more sustainable behaviours and alternative investments. Reform of abstraction charges appears an unavoidable step in making the broader European framework on efficiency and reuse credible. The issue of consumption measurement is equally central: without accurate measurement at the user level, price signals are weakened, demand management becomes ineffective and user accountability remains incomplete.
Water resilience cannot be entrusted to emergency measures or isolated regulatory tools. It requires an ordered sequence of interventions on concessions, pricing, measurement and governance. Without such a shift, the Strategy risks remaining an ambitious but weakly impactful reference; with it, it can become a lever for structural rebalancing of national water systems, aligned with new climatic conditions and the reality of increasing scarcity.
