Will a new strategy improve European water management?
The European Water Resilience Strategy presented this month by the European Commission aims to reduce water pollution, prevent waste and make water accessible to all. The EU's executive body promises to help member states better implement the 2000 Water Framework Directive and three related laws. It will also promote more investment, given the seriousness of the situation.
Only 37% of the EU's surface waters have a good ecological status and only 29% have a good chemical status. The continent is the fastest-warming region in the world due to climate change, which has increased the number of water-related natural disasters.
Currently, 30% of the EU suffers from water scarcity due to prolonged droughts. Meanwhile, devastating floods caused €325 billion in damage between 1980 and 2023.
"Everyone knows the emergency we are in and the investments needed in the sector. We have the numbers," said Hildegard Bentele (Germany/EPP), a centre-right lawmaker who chairs the MEP Water Group at the European Parliament.
"We can react with the next EU budget and make better use of Cohesion Policy, because we have seen that the funds have not been used for the necessary investments," she added.
According to the European Commission, around €55 billion is spent on water investments across Europe, but there is an annual gap of €23 billion additional funding needed.
To address this gap, the EU executive will allocate a larger share of the Cohesion Policy funds, which are intended for less wealthy regions, to water management.
In addition, the European Investment Bank will launch a new programme: €15 billion will be available over the period 2025-2027 and it aims to attract a further €25 billion from commercial investors.
Industry and agriculture are two sectors that use a lot of fresh water and also contribute to its pollution with chemicals. One of the main issues the Commission intends to address is water pollution, particularly caused by chemicals called PFAS or 'forever chemicals'.
"PFAS are substances dubbed forever pollutants because they don't easily break down. So they tend to accumulate over time in the environment. Research has shown that exposure to certain types of PFAS causes serious health problems," said Amandine Hess, Euronews reporter who covered the communication.
"The Commission is planning to launch a public-private partnership to support innovation, to clean up pollution from PFAS and other chemicals. The 'polluter pays' principle will be applied, so it means that public funding would be used only for the sites where it has not been possible to identify who is responsible for the pollution," she added.
NGOs and the European Green Party say the strategy falls far short of providing concrete answers to the complex problems surrounding water management, pointing to a lack of clear legal requirements and a failure to tackle pollution at source.
"The environmentalists are calling for strict management of fertilisers and chemicals. On the other hand, the Commission call to increase water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030 but does not set clear binding targets," said Amandine Hess.
MEP Hildegard Bentele admits that a 10% target for water efficiency is "a modest good intention" and acknowledges that member states are lagging behind in implementing legislation, going so far as to say that "we could sanction member states that do not meet the targets".
"We are behind schedule, we have not seen much progress in the last 20 years. That is why we need to move faster. I would like to see the Commission more rigorous in this regard in the coming years, including in the new strategy",said MEP Hildegard Bentele.
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Journalist: Isabel Marques da Silva
Content production: Pilar Montero López
Video production: Zacharia Vigneron
Graphism: Loredana Dumitru
Editorial coordination: Ana Lázaro Bosch and Jeremy Fleming-Jones
Six weeks after Spain and Portugal suffered a massive power outage, authorities in Madrid issued an official report on Tuesday saying April's cascading blackout that left tens of millions disconnected in seconds was caused by technical and planning errors that led to the grid's failure.
Spain's Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who manages the nation's energy policy, said in a press conference that small grid failures, concentrated in the south of Spain, led to a chain reaction among larger ones.
The minister said several technical causes that contributed to the event, including "the poor planning" by operators of the grid who didn't find a replacement for one power plant that was supposed to help balance power fluctuations.
Aagesen explicitly ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the blackout, blaming instead "vulnerabilities, shortcomings or misconfigurations of security measures that could expose the networks to future risks."
The 28 April outage started shortly after 12:30pm in Spain and lasted through nightfall, disrupting businesses, transport systems, mobile networks, Internet connectivity and other critical infrastructure.
In just five seconds, Spain lost 15 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to 60% of its supply.
Portugal, whose grid is connected to Spain's, also went down. Only the countries' island territories were spared.
Power was fully restored by the early hours of the following day.
The government report included analysts from Spain's national security agencies, which concluded, according to the minister, there were no indications of cyber-sabotage by foreign actors.
The only solid information made public shortly after the system went down came from Spain's grid operator Red Eléctrica, which had narrowed down the source of the outage to two separate incidents in southern Spain where substations had failed.
In the weeks following the blackout, citizens and experts were left wondering what triggered the event in a region not known for power outages and igniting a fierce debate about whether Spain's high levels of renewable power had something to do with the grid failing.
Spain is at the forefront of Europe's transition to renewable energy, having generated nearly 57% of its electricity in 2024 from renewable energy sources like wind, hydropower and solar. The country is also phasing out its nuclear plants.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pushed back against such speculation and defended renewables.
He asked for patience and said that his government would not "deviate a single millimetre" from its energy transition plans, which include a goal of generating 81% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
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