Water Security in the EU: Is the European Water Resilience Strategy Up to the Task?

In June 2025, the European Union (EU) adopted the European Water Resilience Strategy (EUWRS), an initiative aimed at safeguarding European water resources, increasing the competitiveness of EU industries, and revisiting the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC (WFD). The Strategy defines water security as “the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems and a fair balance between water supply and water demand responding to current needs, including the realization of the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, without compromising the rights of future generations.”

The adoption of the Strategy comes at a critical time. After significant droughts in 2018-2019 and in 2022, when 30% of the European population already experiences water stress annually, and with the potential for these threats to be aggravated by climate change and inadequate policy, change is desperately needed. Water security issues have the potential to seriously damage European agriculture, with estimated annual losses in the EU and UK up to €65 billion annually under a no-change scenario. Groundwater supplies, which currently provide 65% of the EU’s water for irrigation and 25% of its drinking water, are threatened by contamination and gradual depletion. Water security risks threaten a variety of other industries, from manufacturing to tourism, shipping, fisheries, and even military preparedness. These challenges endanger Europe’s economic stability and pose quality-of-life and health risks for EU citizens.

The Strategy includes five years of cross-sectoral planning that works with EU Member States to achieve new and old aims, such as those found in the WFD and in other relevant policy, including the Drinking Water Directive (2020/2184), the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (2024/3019), and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC). This brief provides an overview of existing policy as it relates to EU water security and resilience, followed by a critical assessment of what remains missing from the latest EUWRS initiative.

Notes on existing policy, implementation, and issues

In the European Union, water is governed nationally, as the EU sets goals and facilitates cooperation between Member States. National legislation determines how Member States regulate their own water resources, services, and related infrastructure, but EU legislation provides guidelines, objectives, and standards that Member States’ water regulations should meet. Whereas traditional water governance treats resources as being contained within a state’s borders, EU-level governance helps Member States regulate shared waters fairly and cooperatively, ensuring water-driven conflicts do not arise within and outside the EU.

Existing water policy has suffered from poor and patchy implementation, disunity across EU Member States, and, importantly, failures to consider many key threats. In 2021, only 37% of European surface waters had good water status. Explanations for this include poor and uneven monitoring practices, lack of compliance with permits, insufficient integration of ecological goals into WFD targets, abuse of exemptions, a lack of clarity on the most important objectives, minimal enforcement, and a lack of common European measures addressing issues such as wastewater monitoring.

Currently, “good water status” is unevenly distributed across the EU, with some of the lowest average rates of good water status being found in Czechia, Lithuania, Germany, the Low Countries, and Poland. Conversely, the countries with the best water status on average are Spain, Greece, Ireland, and Cyprus. There are other issues with water security beyond water quality, however; Spain and Greece, as Southern European states, are more chronically water-stressed than their northern counterparts. Southern states are more vulnerable to desertification, as their agriculture is largely based on irrigation.

Existing policy has also failed to address some of the most important and recent threats to water security, such as agricultural runoff, pesticides, and fertilizers. It is estimated that 14% of European groundwater is contaminated with nitrates. Moreover, a body of research has emerged on the harmful impacts on human health of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), industrial chemicals known as “forever chemicals,” so-called for their long lifespan and how difficult it is to remove them from water, animal, and human bodies. The WFD does not specifically address PFAS.

The securitization of water resources requires “buy-in” from member states and actors within them. For this process to be effective, water users at all levels must see their interests represented in EU planning. Purely water-driven international conflicts are rare in the current literature on conflict and climate change. When they occur, they tend to arise not over scarce water resources, but over concerns of inequitable resource-sharing, lack of bargaining opportunities, and inconsiderate planning. Planning that opens avenues for cooperation between Members as well as with non-Members, can therefore mitigate these security risks.

The WFD makes provisions for cooperation between Member States and international allies. Member states may seek assistance from the Commission regarding issues that cannot be solved at the national level; the directive, as it applies to members and nonmembers, aims to promote adherence to international water agreements. Finally, for River Basin Districts extending outside the Community, Member States are encouraged to extend the standards of the Directive to those neighbours sharing the basin.

What the EUWRS does right

The EUWRS has quite a few strengths. For one, in 2025-2026, the strategy calls for the Commission to engage in “structured dialogues” with Member States, revisiting the WFD. The goal is for member states to re-evaluate aims within River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs), the often cross-border units of water planning set out in the original WFD, to ensure that “implementation priorities,” such as protections for the quality of water bodies and groundwater supplies, restrictions on abstraction to ensure sustainable water usage, and protections against contamination, are met.

EUWRS calls for investment in sustainable energy and the development of more water-sustainable EU industries. It also calls for expanded and unified water quality monitoring practices across Europe, helping to securitize against the risks of droughts as well as floods. The call for national Flood Risk Management Plans is significant—there was previously no minimum common content in this area. This will aid with sharing knowledge and ‘best practices’ of water management across Member States. It also advances the public dissemination of water-related objectives, making EU citizens more aware of EU-level and national water initiatives.

The aspect of civic participation within the WFD was previously underserved. Local and regional involvement in the development of sustainable water technology and policy will help to ensure that EU water policy will be applicable even given the specificities of local conditions. This policy also boosts technological development, investing into what the Commission refers to as its ‘Water Resilience Research and Innovation Strategy.’

In order to remedy groundwater depletion risks, the Strategy aims to “develop a ‘Sponge Facility’” and to develop technologies and urban/landscape planning in collaboration with relevant national authorities that will help to return and retain groundwater.

The Strategy also pledges to promote, by 2030, the reuse of treated wastewater in non-agricultural applications, as well as assessing the feasibility of setting cross-industrial water reuse targets. This is an area with room for development and potential to help alleviate European water stress: currently, only about 2.5% of European wastewater is reused.

Finally, to mitigate international water conflicts, the Strategy declares that the EU will help to develop international water-sharing treaties and conventions, invest in water security technologies internationally, and promote a “future global water governance framework” beginning in 2025 and 2026. International cooperation and fairness are effective means of conflict prevention regarding water.

What’s missing?

Gaps remain in the Strategy’s plans. While its calls for renewed and recurring investigations into the implementation of WFD and other water provisions in Member States are important, there are few binding measures to ensure that the aforementioned goals are actually met within the established timeframe. While the Strategy claims that it plans to “step up enforcement”, it does not specify what this means or how it will go about pursuing such a framework.

The EUWRS is also weak on PFAS. The Strategy’s PFAS plan is to fund a “public-private initiative to achieve a technological breakthrough in feasible and affordable methods for the detection and remediation of PFAS and other persistent chemicals,” which may sound somewhat promising, excluding the provision, “if the right partners are found.” Given the gravity of the danger these chemicals pose, banking on a potential technological breakthrough for remediation is simply inadequate.

Finally, the Strategy intelligently integrates water goals within its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). While this blended policy initiative helps to make water central to decision-making, it lacks measures to address key issues like nutrient and pesticide runoff. A new development the Strategy puts forward is support for agricultural practices that “sustainably” use pesticides and nutrients through its CAP strategic plans, covering, disappointingly, only 27% and 15% of the EU’s agricultural territory for pesticides and nutrients, respectively.

Conclusion and recommendations

The Strategy is in many respects ambitious, hopeful, and wide-ranging. However, if the European Union wants to secure its water resources for the future, to ensure that its agriculture, its industries, and its people are protected from the threats of water scarcity and pollution, the EU must consider the following:

1. Ensure that the requirements of legislation like the WFD and others are fully implemented and evenly enforced, and provide measures that bind Member States to meet common European water objectives. The commission should expand on its plans for enforcement, making it clear under threat of fines or the withholding of EU funds that implementation goals must be met.

2. Do more than is announced in the Strategy, potentially through CAP, to protect European water bodies from noxious pesticide and nutrient runoff. This could be accomplished by expanding funds for sustainable farming, as well as more strictly regulating quotas for agricultural runoff, accompanying increased monitoring in water bodies.

3. Clamp down on the discharge of PFAS into European waters, including effective at-the-source monitoring and a strict implementation of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and consider serious regulation and potentially outright restrictions on the use of these chemicals in certain industries.