Water Resilience Strategy

The Water Resilience Strategy¹, adopted in June 2025, establishes a comprehensive EU framework to address growing water-related risks arising from climate change, including extreme heat, floods, and droughts. It frames water resilience as a matter of security and crisis preparedness, identifying the availability of clean and affordable freshwater as a guiding priority for the EU. The strategy sets a long-term vision for 2050 in which water systems are resilient, sustainably managed, and capable of supporting public health, ecosystems, and economic activity under changing climate conditions.

The strategy is firmly rooted in a 2050 vision to achieve a water-resilient society through three main objectives:

1. Restoring and protecting the water cycle, which focuses on the sponge-like function of soils, forests, and wetlands to naturally store, purify, and release water;
2. Building a water-smart economy, which aims to boost EU competitiveness by reducing demand across all economic sectors through water savings, efficiency, and safe reuse;
3. Ensuring clean and affordable water for all, which prioritises the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation while empowering consumers through transparent billing and awareness. 

These objectives are operationalised through a set of cross-cutting principles and initiatives, including the water efficiency first principle, which prioritises demand reduction before new abstractions, with a target to improve overall water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030. Additional measures include the expanded use of Copernicus-based digital tools and digital twins for water planning, and decisive action on pollution, including PFAS detection and remediation.