Wednesday, 25 June 2025 at 9 am (CET)

Abstract: Water Reuse (WR) does not effectively respond to water shortages in Europe. Climate change has disrupted everything we knew before. Few countries took this issue strongly, especially regarding water issues, such as Singapore, Namibia (in Windhoek mainly), Bolivia, or California. In Europe, reuse stays marginal, except in few southern countries, because the need for water was not strong enough. Then, water reuse has not been set as a priority. However, water is missing more and more, and its quality is degrading as well. Even if water reuse appears to be a solution to counter water issues, the current legal framework does not seem comprehensive enough to really foster water reuse. France took seriously the recent droughts, and regulated for new uses such as green areas watering, domestic recycling, or urban uses, while the EU only addressed water reuse for agricultural irrigation purposes. In this sense, France could then be considered as “advanced” compared to the EU. However, the French legal framework is criticized for its inapplicability, and its “precautionism”, while few of our neighbours, such as California, Singapore, or Windhoek are using water reuse to produce tap water. Nowing our technical solutions, it appears that the EU could go way further in order to foster the practice. Few ideas appear promising for us, and need to be strengthen and discussed further more.

About Speaker: Thomas Harmand is a PhD researcher under a CIFRE convention, at SCP, and in CEREGE, Aix-Marseille University (FR). His research focuses on wastewater reuse legal framework and governance, mainly from the french perspective, EU perspective, with a strong focus on the Tunisian framework. Following the « Plan Eau » published in 2023 in reaction to the 2022 droughts occuring in France, many texts have been adopted by the french government to regulate on water reuse. According to many specialists, the current legal framework does not appear to really foster the practice. Regarding this analysis, the goal of his PhD is to propose measures that will allow water reuse to be facilitated. He is a member of Working Group WG1 of Water4Reuse (Cost Action 23104). In this seminar, Thomas will discuss the french legal framework inconsistencies, by comparing to other countries’ framework. After doing so, he will bring the problem to the EU level, and try to imagine what would a global framework look like.

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