Water resilience · Conference statement

EU Water Resilience Conference Statement

All of Europe and every sector of its economy are affected by climate change, frequently through excesses or shortages of water. Europe’s waters face significant pressure, and the EU urgently needs to improve resilience and ensure sustainable freshwater supplies for people and nature.

We call on the European Commission to

1. Prioritise full implementation of the EU Green Deal to build resilience, mitigate climate impacts, halt biodiversity loss and limit resource use, including water.
2. Implement the Nature Restoration Law without delay and use National Restoration Plans to re-establish freshwater wilderness and nature-based solutions.
3. Develop a water and climate resilience law requiring Member States to create EU Natural Water Reserves protecting critical supplies and catchments in water-stressed areas.
4. Finance the restoration and protection of floodplains, rivers and wetlands and scale up natural water-retention measures, including through an EU Sponge Facility.
5. Establish sectoral water-efficiency and abstraction targets at basin level for all water users.
6. Enforce the Water Framework Directive and increase the Commission’s legal capacity to address pending complaints and cases.
7. Create independent scientific climate-adaptation proofing for new EU legislative and non-legislative acts.
8. Eliminate subsidies harmful to river morphology, water quality, natural retention and groundwater, in line with Target 18 of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
9. Introduce true water valuation and stop treating surplus water only as a problem or threat.
10. Reform the Common Agricultural Policy and provide financial, legal and institutional support to local and family farmers and communities using sustainable traditional landscape-management knowledge.
11. Stop EU and Member State financing of opaque water-transfer and hydropower projects in the Western Balkans that endanger landscapes and communities.
12. Update and regularly monitor pollutant lists, including PFAS, to guarantee safe drinking water.
13. Fully implement the INSPIRE and Aarhus Directives and improve open, editable land-use and digital-elevation data.
14. Follow UN World Water Development Report guidance, prioritising bottom-up approaches, local communities, traditional knowledge and civil society over opaque, corruption-prone grey infrastructure.

We call on the Hungarian Government to

1. Use scientific evidence and Carpathian Basin climate models to transform outdated practices such as excessive dredging and vegetation clearance.
2. Develop national land-use and stewardship strategies based on coherent landscape networks and nature-based solutions, including sustainable beaver management.
3. Support bottom-up agricultural practices that retain water, including traditional grazing, notch systems, floodplain orchards, agroforestry and paludiculture.
4. Redefine flooding and inland water and adapt infrastructure rules, agricultural regulation and subsidies so that water-retention areas become part of agricultural land use.
5. Achieve at least 30% floodplain cover during floods through controlled diversion and gravity-flow landscape elements.
6. Use EU and CAP funding for water-based landscape restoration, including approximately 10% water recharge in the Great Plain.
7. Stop damaging development around lakes and implement the Balaton Green Minimum by empowering local governments and strengthening subsidiarity.
8. Assess and update the national water balance at least every four years, including virtual-water trade in battery, biofuel and maize-ethanol strategies.
9. Adopt new regulation for flood protection, drainage systems and groundwater wells that safeguards water for future generations.
10. Enforce monitoring requirements for groundwater abstraction.
11. Stop using EU exemptions to spray nerve agents over wetlands as mosquito control without scientific evidence.
12. Finance water utilities adequately to reduce drinking-water losses and improve wastewater treatment, including nature-based reed or willow zones where appropriate.
13. Ensure full transparency for projects affecting surface and groundwater and prevent harmful projects from receiving priority national-economy status.
14. Promote ecological restoration of lakes, rivers and wetlands, including removal of hard bank protection and barriers and restoration of natural morphology and vegetation.
15. Accelerate domestic implementation of the Water Framework Directive through adequate budgets, legislative changes and stronger environmental, nature-protection and water authorities.

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