Something is happening to Europe’s rivers.
This summer, extraordinarily low water levels have become visible across the continent. The Rhine, Po, Loire and Danube (Donau) - rivers that have shaped European landscapes, economies and communities for centuries - have all reached record low levels during August 2026.
For me, this is more than an abstract environmental statistic.
Living in northern Italy, I have watched rivers that I knew as substantial, fast-flowing bodies of water become dramatically diminished. Wide riverbeds that once carried powerful currents now contain comparatively narrow flows of water.
It raises an obvious question:
Where is the water going?
The conventional answer begins with drought: insufficient precipitation, reduced snowpack, extreme heat and increased evaporation.
All of those factors matter.
But drought and water scarcity are not synonymous.
The European Commission itself distinguishes between drought, caused by reduced precipitation, and water scarcity, which represents a more systemic imbalance between the water available and the demand placed upon it.
And that distinction changes the question.
Because Europe's freshwater is not merely affected by weather.
We abstract it.
From rivers.
From lakes and reservoirs.
And from groundwater beneath our feet.
The EU currently abstracts approximately 193 billion cubic metres of freshwater per year. Electricity generation and cooling account for approximately 33% of abstraction, agriculture for 31%, public water supply for 21% and manufacturing for 14%.
At the same time, groundwater abstraction for European agriculture increased by approximately 52% between 2000 and 2023.
Those figures do not prove that abstraction is responsible for the extraordinarily low rivers we are seeing today. Nor should water abstraction be confused with water consumption: substantial quantities of abstracted water are subsequently returned to the environment.
But the figures do establish something important.
Human decisions form part of Europe's water balance.
And that means that when rivers reach extraordinary lows, asking where the water goes is not speculation.
It is a legitimate question of resource governance.
The transparency problem
This is where my concern increasingly lies.
Europe has sophisticated legislation governing water quality, ecological status, abstraction permits and groundwater protection. Member States collect substantial quantities of water data.
Yet for an ordinary citizen — or even a professional researcher — answering a seemingly straightforward question can be surprisingly difficult:
Who is abstracting freshwater, where, in what quantities, under which permits, and for what purpose?
The European Environment Agency publishes valuable aggregated figures. National and regional authorities maintain permits and registers. Individual industries publish varying amounts of environmental information.
But these pieces do not necessarily produce an easily accessible picture of who is taking what from a particular water system at a particular moment.
That matters.
Because water scarcity affected approximately 28% of EU territory and 32% of its population during at least one season in 2023. The European Environment Agency concludes that, despite a 14% reduction in total abstraction since 2000, there has been no corresponding overall reduction in the European area experiencing water scarcity.
Meanwhile, abstraction has increased since 2010 in agriculture, public water supply and manufacturing.
So perhaps the question we should be asking is not simply:
Why are our rivers running low?
But also:
What do we actually know about the water being removed from them — and from the groundwater systems that sustain them?
That is not an accusation.
It is a transparency question.
And as freshwater becomes a more contested resource, transparency over abstraction may become one of the most important prerequisites for legitimate water governance.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten