"France is on alert" and "we are about 2 months late in filling" the water tables, acknowledged Wednesday on Franceinfo Christophe Béchu, the Minister for Ecological Transition, on the front line to manage tensions on the use of water between agriculture, electricity production, leisure and ecosystems.

Next Monday, the minister must bring together prefects in order to “take restrictive measures which are + soft +, from March, to avoid ending up in catastrophic arbitration situations” as summer approaches.

Meanwhile, the Pyrénées-Orientales have been on drought alert since June, joined by the Var since Friday.

And in the Landes, on Tuesday, a thousand farmers protested preventively to defend their quotas for sampling and the construction of structures to store water.

“There is no agriculture without water,” Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau repeated on Wednesday, in front of journalists, confirming that 60 new agricultural hydraulic works projects were going to be “commissioned in here in June".

It is therefore time to save water, a theme on which France is a bad student.

"We had a culture of abundance," said Minister Béchu, with "less than 1% of our wastewater treated", while it "is reused 10 times more in Italy, 20 times more in Spain. " and almost 85 times more in Israel.

On the distribution side, "20% of our drinking water leaks and we have no plan" to remedy it, "with territories which are sometimes up to 70% leaky", many of which are those who have failed to drinking water in the summer of 2022, he added.

In 2019, France withdrew some 31 billion cubic meters of water per year, when 208 billion cubic meters were renewed annually in natural environments, according to ministry statistics.

But the government's "Water plan", - around fifty measures supposed to draw lessons from the unprecedented crisis of 2022, when almost all the departments were experiencing restrictions -, is long overdue.

Scheduled for January, it should now be unveiled by the end of March.

The longest series of days without rain © Sylvie HUSSON / AFP

Heat and dryness

Hurry up.

Metropolitan France did not experience any real rain from January 21 to February 21 - the cumulative aggregate rainfall on the metropolis being less than 1 mm daily -, i.e. 32 days, the longest period "since the start of the measurements in 1959 “, announced Wednesday Météo-France.

This drought, which beats the 31-day record set in 2020 during the Covid-19 confinement, should end on Wednesday with the passage of a low rainfall disturbance.

But the episode is all the more worrying as it occurs in winter, a crucial period of groundwater recharge, much less nourished by spring rains.

These are mainly absorbed by the return of vegetation.

“Since August 2021, all the months have had a rainfall deficit with the exception of December 2021, June 2022 and September 2022”, underlines Météo-France which adds that “the month of February 2023 should end with a rainfall deficit of more than 50%, becoming one of the driest Februarys on record."

To this rain deficit is added a heat above the "norm in France for twelve months in a row", February being able "to be the thirteenth of this unprecedented series" since the first reliable data of 1947, adds Météo-France .

The dried up courtyard of the Issole, in Flassans-sur-Issole (Var), February 21, 2023 © Nicolas TUCAT / AFP

These heat and drought anomalies are no longer isolated events but are repeated in a shorter timeframe and with greater intensity, illustrating the forecasts of the IPCC, the UN climate experts, on the consequences of global warming caused by the 'human activity.

"Global warming is between 15 and 40% less water reserve available for France", recalled Christophe Béchu on Wednesday.

© 2023 AFP