Sufficiency: challenges for Veolia Water France
Abstract
Sufficiency has emerged as an appropriate approach for tackling water-related issues in a context marked by different challenges: a sharp spike in water stress, mostly caused by the climate crisis, but also inadequate investment in infrastructure. Given this situation, sufficiency is a useful lever for delivering short-term solutions to problems relating to water stress. It is increasingly also a necessary precondition for efforts to bolster the acceptability of industrial actors. Jean-François Nogrette discusses a range of levers for implementing sufficiency: decoupling production and distribution in business models for water management, as Veolia already does with a number of its contracts, as well as behavioral innovations in the form of helping people to change their behaviors. Useful though they are, these levers also have to be accompanied by other approaches, and Veolia does not consider that sufficiency can be a one-size-fits-all response to the challenges that water stress poses. Innovation, energy efficiency, and resource recycling and circularity solutions are all indispensable levers for making ecological transformation a reality.
Outline
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1Recent years have seen sufficiency impose itself as one component of scenarios for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, alongside other levers such as energy transition and shifting to renewables. Bodies such as the IPCC and International Energy Agency now include sufficiency, meaning a reduction in energy demand, as a factor in their thinking and scenarios. How sufficiency is translated into policies remains, however, variable according to the country and context.
2In France, sufficiency has a notably high political profile, mainly as a result of the sufficiency plan the French government launched in 2022. And while sufficiency-based approaches can be applied in multiple domains and industries, sufficiency relating to individual and collective use of water resources is the subject of particular attention in a context of heightened water stress acknowledged by all stakeholders. In 2023, France’s government unveiled its Water Plan, designed to steer industrial businesses and ordinary citizens toward an approach governed by water sufficiency and an acceleration of the shift to sustainable management of water.
3As the champion of ecological transformation, the concept of sufficiency, and water sufficiency in particular, is something we are clearly very interested in, not only in terms of municipal contracts but also to help ensure that major industrial projects are locally acceptable. While sufficiency is something that concerns all the Group’s activities, in this article we will focus on the specific case of sufficiency as it relates to water management, the Group’s historical activity.
Sufficiency provides some necessary solutions for dealing with water stress against a background of underinvestment in infrastructure
- 1 https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/sites/strategie.gouv.fr/files/atoms/files/fs-2024-na_136_enjeux_et_us (...)
- 2 https://www.academie-technologies.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/20230703_Rapport_AT_Apports_technol (...)
4We should start with the following two observations. The investment needed to tackle the water crisis and provide genuine industrial-scale responses is considerable, and far from materializing as yet. At the same time, water stress is something that economic modeling fails to take into account sufficiently. According to the most recent report from France Stratégie on the subject, renewable water resources, indispensable to multiple anthropic uses and the operation of aquatic systems, fell by 14% in France over the past 15 years.1 This trend will probably worsen, in particular during the summer, as a result of the climate crisis. An independent report published in June 2023 by the Academy of Technologies2 demonstrates that three major elements contribute to growing pressure on available water resources: discharges of chemical or biological pollution into water resources, resulting in the need for special treatments prior to use or to identify alternative resources; the consequences of the climate crisis on the water cycle and the amount of water abstracted, and, conflicts between the amount of water needed for human activities and the amount needed to maintain healthy natural ecosystems.
5The reality of this situation tends to indicate that investment in water and sewage infrastructure remains too limited. Water networks – 875,000 km for drinking water and 425,000 km for sewage and wastewater, half of it located in rural areas – face many difficulties. Nationally, leaks mean that 20% of drinking water leaving treatment plants never arrives at its destination. These losses represent close to one billion cubic meters every year, equivalent to the amount used by approximately 18.5 million residents. The investments required are considerable: the network renewal rate is currently just 0.6% a year. In a report published in 2022,3 the Water Industries Union estimated that approximately €2.7 billion was needed to renovate the drinking water network, with the sewage network requiring a further €2 billion. The estimated investment shortfall for these two networks is put at €1.8 billion and €1.4 billion respectively.
6We are now in some ways racing against the clock to address water stress, in an environment where the necessary investments are likely to take some time. In this situation, sufficiency, particularly in terms of managing behaviors, becomes a go-to lever for taking action. Encouraging sufficiency provides an initial response and solution to mitigate the consequences of the inadequate rollout of solutions to improve efficiency and yield in the networks. Alternatively, supporting behavioral change may under certain conditions offer a faster-acting lever.
7However, sufficiency and the question of saving water are also keys to ensuring social acceptability, or even prerequisites that must be respected in order to obtain a license to operate. This aspect appears to be very much a key expectation on the part of the Group’s stakeholders: industrial actors, public bodies, and residents.
Levers for driving sufficiency, from business model to behavioral innovations
8Given this background, a number of levers exist for making sufficiency a concrete reality.
9The first involves embedding sufficiency as a determining features of business models, something Veolia is already working on. One example is the northern French city of Lille where production and distribution are now decoupled to make the system more durable.
10The situation in Lille is complex: groundwater recharging has fallen 20% since 2017 while the population is forecast to grow by 5% over the coming decade, supported by the construction of 6,000 new homes. Unlike most other regions of France, there is no major river that crosses the greater Lille area, itself very densely populated. Four million people – the Lille metropolitan region with its very buoyant local economy, the coalfields, and Belgium – all share the same groundwater.
11Here, for the first time, we will receive payment for the amount of water saved. We have made a commitment to deliver a 4% cut in the amount of water purchased from Sourceo, the public entity that produces the water, under the terms of what we have called a water sufficiency contract. And the price end users pay for their water remains controlled.
12We are also going to support consumers in efforts to reduce the amount of water they use. Remote meter reading will be rolled out over the next four years for all consumers, who will be alerted within 48 hours if a leak is detected. We are also going to be encouraging people to behave more sustainably. We intend to distribute 550,000 water-saving kits that include aerators to reduce flow from taps, a timer to help people realize how long they spend under the shower, a plastic bladder to place in the toilet cistern to reduce the volume of water, a flow regulator for showers, and a guide to raise awareness. These kits will be handed out door-to-door. We will thus be paid not for providing more, but for providing less.
13We have opted for the same approach as part of our contract with the city of Verdun, committing to delivering a 22% cut in water use (10% for residents, 30% for the municipality) by distributing 150,000 water-saving kits.
14A second mechanism lies in systematizing behavioral innovation. All the literature agrees that efforts to change behaviors can be divided into two key phases: on the one hand, understanding existing behaviors and recognizing different preconceptions that may affect our decision-making, on the other hand, implementing behavioral levers to encourage change. Veolia is committed to a focus on understanding, formulating, and scaling up mechanisms of these types.
15Sufficiency can be encouraged through ambitious targets centering on raising awareness and changing people’s behaviors. But it would be a mistake to believe these targets replace collective initiatives, when they actually work to accelerate them by urging everybody to act at their own level. This is the approach we have adopted as part of the Eco d’Eau initiative in France, which aims to get the largest possible number of people involved in actions that permanently alter our relationship to water.
16Veolia is supporting the goals announced in the French government’s Water Plan by rolling out Eco d’Eau, designed to help regions and industries tackle the issue of dwindling water resources. This is a collective initiative recognized by the government with its “Every action counts. Let’s preserve our resources" label. It provides participants with access to educational tools highlighting sufficiency issues and the 33 eco-friendly actions everyone can take, a charter of voluntary commitments for organizations to structure and share their commitments with external stakeholders and employees, and a manifesto for individuals to highlight their involvement.
17Environmental actions can also help create a positive dynamic for tackling broader social issues. This approach is central to actions taken by Veolia Water Île-de-France, particularly its Eau Solidaire program which aims to link the question of ecological sufficiency to the fight against water poverty. Our goal here is to duplicate the mechanisms of what we could call a just transition by working on social as well as environmental dimensions.
- 4 Every year 2.5 million euros (representing 1% of income from water sales) are allocated to the Eau (...)
18As part of the Eau Solidaire initiative, created in 20114 by the Greater Paris Water Authority (SEDIF) and its operator Veolia Water Ile-de-France, we partner with various organizations (Compagnons Bâtisseurs and Impact Copro) to launch targeted programs for reducing water consumption in badly maintained housing blocks. We aim to work on various levels: technical aspects, by repairing leaks; behavior, with workshops on awareness-raising, prevention and education on the main consequences of excessive water use (waste, damage to the building, financial costs, modifying social ties, etc.), and longer-term prevention by training residents in simple repair work so they have the tools to undertake repairs in their building themselves.
19In our view, sufficiency is not a miracle solution that can solve all the challenges we face. However, given the complexity of the problems that need tackling, such as water sufficiency, we cannot afford to discount any solutions. If we want to be capable of rising to the challenge of the changes to come, we need to combine sufficiency with other levers for taking action, especially innovation and the search for energy efficiency, resource recycling and circularity solutions.
Notes
1 https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/sites/strategie.gouv.fr/files/atoms/files/fs-2024-na_136_enjeux_et_usages_de_leau_avril.pdf.
2 https://www.academie-technologies.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/20230703_Rapport_AT_Apports_technologies_besoins_eau_douce_web.pdf.
3 https://eau-entreprises.org/actualite/patrimoine-de-leau-2022/.
4 Every year 2.5 million euros (representing 1% of income from water sales) are allocated to the Eau Solidaire program.
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References
Bibliographical reference
Jean-François Nogrette, “Sufficiency: challenges for Veolia Water France”, Field Actions Science Reports, Special Issue 26 | 2024, 86-88.
Electronic reference
Jean-François Nogrette, “Sufficiency: challenges for Veolia Water France”, Field Actions Science Reports [Online], Special Issue 26 | 2024, Online since 10 August 2024, connection on 12 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/7562
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