The Red Agua Pública (RAP) claims the need to assume the climate emergency and the determination to advance in the fight against climate change. The RAP reaffirms the demand to implement public, democratic, transparent and sustainable management models for the integral urban water cycle.

Every year, on 22 March, at the initiative of the United Nations, World Water Day is commemorated with the aim of drawing attention to problem of water through relevant issues. In 2020, the World Water Day has been focused on the relationship between climate change and water, and the impacts and the policies for adapting to climate change affect and are related to water directly.

There is a broad social and scientific consensus that the impacts of climate change on water resources will lead to substantial changes in the availability, quality and quantity of water for aquatic ecosystems and basic human needs. It can threat the effective enjoyment of the human rights to water and sanitation. Food sovereignty, human health, urban and rural settlements, energy production, industrial and economic development, employment and ecosystems are all dependent on water and therefore vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

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Civil Society Statement
December 10, 2019

On behalf of 276 civil society organizations from around the world, we are calling upon the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) to abandon the certification of destructive hydropower projects as climate-friendly. The proposed hydropower criteria developed by CBI and its technical working group fall far short of acceptable standards and practice, and their adoption would pose a significant threat to rivers and the communities and freshwater species that depend on them.

If adopted, the CBI’s hydropower criteria would risk opening up a funding source that could prove profitable to dam operators and institutional investors with Paris-friendly branding, while making no meaningful contribution to stemming the climate crisis. Beyond permitting projects with dubious value to attract a new line of financing, the greatest risk of the proposed criteria is channeling scarce climate dollars toward projects that fail to help us confront the challenge of preventing a 2^oC scenario and that exert increased pressure on freshwater biodiversity and the functioning of our water cycle.

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Rome, 9th March 2020

It is clear that the measures taken by the Italian Government to contain the spread of Coronavirus pandemic are producing a state of exception and a substantial suspension of democracy.

We do not wish to embark on a reasoning about the appropriateness or necessity of these measures, but rather we want to highlight a contradiction that could have serious social and health repercussions.

In a situation where citizens are literally drowned out by prohibitions and prescriptions, in the collective and individual effort to mitigate the risk of contagion, nowhere have we read the most basic health and hygiene provision: access to water for all.

Throughout Italy, water service managers are implementing, with different nuances, the practice of cutting off water in the event of fraud or other irregularities such as those identified by the notorious Article 5 of Lupi Decree which denies access to essential public services, including water, to those who are forced to squatting for shelter.

This is a violation of a human right that is even more odious and dangerous for public health in the current context, in which the first mesure recalled by all is precisely hygiene.

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Brussels, October 18, 2019

Since the publication of an EU action plan for the circular economy in 2015, the circular economy has been at the heart of the European Union's economic and environmental policies. As the reuse of treated wastewater is considered one of the most promising forms of circular economy, the European Commission has taken several measures to promote this practice in the European Union, including the drafting in 2018 of a Regulation on minimum requirements for water reuse. This Regulation was adopted in 2019 by the European Parliament and the Council with a very large number of amendments. In the coming weeks, negotiations in the trilogue are expected to lead to the adoption of the final version of the Regulation.

European Water Movement, most of whose members are confronted with projects to reuse treated wastewater on their territory, wishes to make several comments on the Regulation and more generally on the promotion of the reuse of treated wastewater, in particular for agricultural irrigation. It seems to us that every project must first be the subject of a study seriously assessing its impact on health, environmental and economic aspects. One of the European Commission's tasks should be to formalise this study as much as possible, in order to help Member States to implement only projects that are viable for these three aspects. The measures, including legislative measures taken so far by the European Commission on the reuse of treated wastewater, rather lead to simplification and weakening of the impact assessment, with a significant risk of implementing projects that go against some of the objectives of the circular economy.

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