The EU Water Resilience Strategy: United in Diversity
by Dani Gaillard-Picher
It sounds like a bad joke: How do you get 27 countries representing 449 million people to agree on what water resilience is? There is no punchline, but that is precisely what lawmakers in the European Union are trying to figure out right now, under the leadership of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the first ever EU Commissioner explicitly responsible for water resilience, Jessika Roswall. With half of its river basins expected to be affected by water stress and scarcity by 2030 and flood and drought damages to usurp around 1.5% of its GDP by 2050, political priority for the issue comes none too soon.
Since 2000, the EU has ratified extensive legislative frameworks for water management, but they are not effectively or consistently applied across the EU. By its own admission, the EU’s Water Framework Directive (WFD) “is poorly implemented, underfunded and barely enforced.” Unfortunately, that means the EU did not meet its 2015 WFD targets and is far offtrack to meet its 2027 targets.
In a concerted effort to not mirror the negativity in mainstream media, I do want to point out a few genuinely positive developments:
Work on the EU’s Water Resilience Initiative was reignited after a pause in 2024 and continues to gain speed, with a strategy set to emerge by the end of the year.
Recognizing the inherent interdependencies between water and climate, the EU highlighted water significantly in the text it published for the UNFCCC COP29 climate conference.
On January 29th, the European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) issued an excellent draft report on the European Water Resilience Strategy, in which it urges the EU Commission to integrate the water dimension into all EU policies and encourages assessing how every EU policy can impact water resources. The language they employ around resilience is a breath of fresh air, shifting the paradigm towards a transformative future.
The European Institute for Technology (EIT) is launching a Knowledge Innovation Community (KIC) on water, marine and maritime sectors and ecosystems in 2026. It seeks to unite business, education and research in the domain of water and oceans, with the ultimate goal of boosting innovative projects.
A new European Citizens’ Initiative for a Water-Smart and Resilient Europe has been launched, aiming to collect one million expressions of support before the end of October.
The exciting trend that is emerging from all of this is increased acknowledgement for water as a critical vector and economic asset within interconnected and circular systems, enabling a meaningful pathway towards resilience. Since 2021, AGWA has been working with countries in this direction through the application of the Water Resilience Tracker for National Climate Planning. This important diagnostic tool supports the understanding and enhancement of water resilience across complicated and fragmented governance structures and funding mechanisms to create a cohesive water resilience strategy inclusive of agriculture, energy, industry, nature, and services, just to name a few.
While it is easy for everyone to agree that water resilience is important, debates in the EU Parliament reflect different positions on the question of sovereignty over these issues. Overall, patches of resistance persist about the utility of creating additional binding legislation, rather than augmenting implementation and enforcement efforts for the existing legal instruments. Agricultural water and water quality remain elements of high concern among member states, while technology and innovation are perceived as promising pathways for increasing data and resource availability through efficiency, reuse, and modernization of critical infrastructure. With a warning about the cost of inaction, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the Water Resilience Strategy, MEP Thomas Bajada, clearly argued that Europe’s future competitivity depends on its water resilience.
How to finance implementation remains the spoke in the wheel. Investment in water resilience from the EU, the European Investment Bank and national budgets (excluding emergency aid for disasters) is estimated at approximately €63bn annually, but the budgets are currently fragmented across multiple policy areas. The European Investment Bank estimates that the annual capital investment in water supply will need to increase by at least 50% to comply with the targets set in the EU's water directives. Such investment could save €3 billion annually and create 13,000 jobs, according to Water Europe.
In the face of massive disruptions, the EU currently lacks an adequate dedicated financing mechanism to achieve water resilience for social, environmental and economic resilience. For effective on the ground implementation of the strategy, ambitious dedicated financing mechanisms or an umbrella fund within the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework will be necessary, blending public and private investments with conditionalities for water resilience projects, at multiple levels. The ENVI committee also recommended the creation of a separate and dedicated fund to this end.
The motto of the European Union “United in diversity” first came into use in 2000, at the same time its Water Framework Directive was ratified. The EU Water Resilience Strategy exercise challenges these 27 countries representing 449 million people once again to unite in all their diversity and to act for the recognition of water’s intrinsic value in a just transition towards environmentally sustainable economies and societies across the continent. The leadership demonstrated by the EU in this domain will certainly influence how other countries conceptualize their water and climate goals and modernize their regulatory regimes in the future.