Today, the European Commission published its European Preparedness Union Strategy, setting out actions to increase the societal resilience of the EU.

Drinking water and waste water networks are critical infrastructures providing essential services to citizens and businesses. The Strategy rightly identifies these services as areas that are a prerequisite to ensuring vital societal functions. We fully support the statement that the societal benefits of robust preparedness outweigh their costs and that preparedness and resilience considerations should be included in the EU budget programmes from the start.

The EU Stockpiling Strategy should guarantee the access of water operators to critical resources across the EU.

EurEau strongly supports the intention to present a European Climate Adaptation Plan. With natural disasters on the rise, water operators will have to invest massively in ensuring the continuity of services over the next decades.

The Strategy rightly points at the role the European Water Resilience Strategy can play in ensuring societal resilience. Nature-based solutions should indeed be applied whenever possible and policies to end the contamination of our water bodies through control-at-source measures should be stepped up. The lower the pollution of our water resources, the better water operators can contribute to the bioeconomy and the circular economy.

Last but not least, EurEau supports the creation of an EU Preparedness Task Force and is willing to contribute with the expertise of our 38 national member organisations.