Once we accept that freshwater abstraction can influence the condition of rivers and groundwater bodies, an obvious legal question follows:
Who is actually allowed to take the water?
In the European Union, water abstraction is not supposed to operate in a legal vacuum.
The EU Water Framework Directive requires Member States to control the abstraction of freshwater from both surface water and groundwater. Article 11 specifically requires registers of water abstractions and prior authorisation for abstraction, although Member States may exempt abstractions that have no significant impact on water status. These controls must also be periodically reviewed and, where necessary, updated.
In other words, there should already be a substantial administrative record of who is entitled to abstract water.
That is important.
Because the legal question is not whether governments can regulate abstraction.
They already do.
The more interesting question is whether the resulting system provides sufficient transparency to understand what is actually happening within an individual river basin.
A Permit Is Not an Unlimited Right to Water
An abstraction permit should not be viewed simply as a permanent entitlement to a fixed quantity of water regardless of changing circumstances.
The Water Framework Directive connects water use to broader environmental objectives. Member States must promote efficient and sustainable water use and prevent abstraction from undermining the required status of European water bodies.
The European Commission has also emphasised that abstraction controls and permits should be periodically reviewed. In its 2025 assessment of implementation of EU environmental law, the Commission specifically called on numerous Member States — including Italy and the Netherlands — to ensure periodic reviews of permits for abstraction and other water uses.
This becomes particularly important during prolonged periods of low water availability.
A quantity that may have been sustainable when a permit was granted is not necessarily sustainable under fundamentally different hydrological conditions.
Scarcity Changes the Context
The European Commission defines water scarcity as a situation in which demand frequently exceeds the sustainable supply capacity of the natural system within a river basin.
It also explicitly recognises that overexploitation of available water resources can exacerbate the consequences of drought.
That distinction deserves attention.
A drought may reduce the amount of water entering a system.
Human abstraction determines part of what subsequently leaves the available freshwater resource.
The two can occur simultaneously.
This means that exceptionally low river levels cannot automatically be attributed either to drought or to abstraction without examining the hydrological evidence.
But it also means that abstraction cannot simply be left out of the analysis.
From Registers to Real Transparency
EU law requires registers.
But the existence of a register is not necessarily the same thing as meaningful public transparency.
For someone trying to understand the pressure on a particular river or groundwater body, the useful questions are far more specific:
Which abstraction permits are currently active?
Who holds them?
What quantities are authorised?
What quantities are actually being abstracted?
Are those figures measured in real time or reported retrospectively?
Are permits adjusted when river levels or groundwater levels become critically low?
And can the public access that information without navigating multiple authorities, databases and technical documents?
The Water Framework Directive requires River Basin Management Plans to include a summary of controls on abstraction and impoundment, including references to the relevant registers.
That provides an important framework for accountability.
But as water scarcity becomes more frequent, there is a reasonable case for asking whether a system designed more than two decades ago now provides the degree of granular, timely and accessible information required for modern water governance.
Transparency Before Restriction
This becomes particularly important when scarcity forces governments to make choices.
Restrictions may eventually affect farmers, industrial operators, households, energy producers or other users. Governments may have to decide which uses of freshwater deserve priority and which must temporarily be reduced.
Such decisions can be necessary.
But their legitimacy depends on something more than legal authority.
They also require public confidence that the available resource is being allocated rationally, proportionately and transparently.
Before asking society to accept restrictions, governments should therefore be able to answer a remarkably straightforward question:
Who is taking water from the system, how much are they taking, and on what legal basis?
The infrastructure for answering that question largely already exists.
The next challenge is ensuring that the information becomes sufficiently accessible to make water allocation genuinely transparent.
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