Water in Europe

Rainer Enderlein and Francesca Bernardini ⁽¹⁾

Water shortages and inadequate sanitation are reported on every continent, including Europe.

Worldwide, some 2.4 billion people lack access to basic sanitation and 1.2 billion, or one in five, lack safe drinking water. In Europe, an estimated 120 million people, i.e. one in seven of the population, do not have access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, thus causing water-related diseases, such as cholera, dysentery, coli infections, viral hepatitis A, and typhoid.

For many years, Europeans were told – at least in some parts of Europe – that their environment is safe and that major water pollution and water supply problems do not exist. This picture changed dramatically in the 1990s when environmentally and health- related problems were not any more well- kept governmental secrets. Today, mainly industry and agriculture, but also tourism, represent a serious threat to water resources quality and quantity. 31% of Europe’s population lives in countries that experience high water stress. Water shortages are a major problem in southern Europe where there is a combination of low water availability and high demand from agriculture.

Regardless this critical situation, water is still wasted due to improper irrigation practices and huge water losses from the distribution systems: in most countries 30% of the drinking water is lost in the supply network with peaks up to 60% and more in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Ukraine, just to mention a few examples. It is extremely positive that this problem has finally reached recognition at the global political level and has been introduced in the Ministerial Declaration of the World Water Forum in Kyoto. Europe’s role on highlighting the issue has been of out-most importance.

These problems are not easy to solve. They require big investments in water treatment installations and distribution systems. It was assessed at the last session of the Commission on Sustainable Development that the financial resources needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals must double the $15 billion currently spent annually for potable water and sanitation services. But financial resources are often not available where the problems are most serious, in particular in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia.

But if the situation is not perfect and problems remain, Europe has an important asset: it has developed the tools to tackle them. National and pan-European water legislation has been developing in the last twenty years, culminating in the adoption of the UNECE Water Convention and its related Protocols on Water and Health (jointly developed under UNECE’s and WHO’s auspices) and on Civil Liability for Damage caused by Industrial Accidents, and the entering into force of the EU Water Framework Directive in 2000. These pieces of legislation, including the concept of managing water in the entire basin – thus disregarding national or administrative boundaries, and setting clear targets and tar- get dates – are indeed powerful tools to pro- tect freshwater in the region, and have also become a reference for other countries.

Another peculiarity of the European situation is the essentially transboundary nature of its water resources. There are some 150 major transboundary rivers, 25 major international lakes and more than 100 transboundary aquifers. It is therefore not surprising that there is a long tradition of transboundary cooperation on freshwaters in the region. Many European countries heavily depend on other countries. Hungary and Romania, for example, receive between 50 and 75 percent of their total water resources from neighbouring countries. This could become a source of disputes between countries, and requires new policies that are all-embracing and environmentally sound, and that involve the public at large.

The critical importance of freshwaters not only to provide basics needs for the human population but also to alleviate poverty, sustain wealth and development, protect biodiversity, and guarantee security is now widely recognized. This is why our perception of “water” has undergone a deep change over the last decade: from the perception of “water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good”, as defined in principle 4 of the 1992 Dublin Conference on Water and the Environment, to the most recent understanding that “water has social, economic and environmental values and should therefore be managed so as to realize the most acceptable and sustainable combination of those values”, embedded in the legally-binding Protocol on Water and Health. Water management is no longer the sole responsibility of scientists, technicians and managers. We continue to speak about “integrated” water resources management, but integration is now a multi-faceted concept. It integrates land, surface water, groundwater, coastal water and the marine environment, on the one hand, and it integrates, legal, social, cultural and economic components, on the other.

This new concept of integrated water resources management is now being implemented at large scales. UNECE became the lead agency for its implementation in countries in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. Other economic commissions will be involved in similar regional or sub-regional implementation projects, as it is the case with ECA for the African continent. We call it “Partnership on water for sustainable development”, originally launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development as EU Water Initiative. This partnership with strong stakeholder participation, a pro-poor emphasis and gender sensitivity, will only work if we join forces with other UN agencies, most prominently UNEP, WHO and UNDP. The European Commission, OECD, OSCE and the Global Water Partnership are the most well- known organizations outside the UN family.

Water remains to be a highly delicate and political issue. The purely economic approach, treating water as an economic good, a tradable commodity submitted to economic and trade rules is guiding the last negotiation round of the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) in the World Trade Organization to extend WTO’s scope to cover water-related services. But there is also another approach – the human right to water, as declared, for example by the UN Commit- tee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its General Comments on 26 November 2002, which identified the human right to water as a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights, implying that water should be treated as a social and cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good. In the UNECE, we do believe that we have to strike a balance between the right to clean water and adequate sanitation on the one hand, and the obligation to protect the environment, on the other. This has already been firmly embedded in a pan-European water law – the Protocol on Water and Health.

¹ Rainer Enderlein is secretary to the Meeting of the Parties to the UNECE Water Convention and Vice-Chairman of UN-Water. Francesca Bernardini is secretary to working groups under the Convention.