The EU’s drinking water governance: mopping the floor while the tap is running

The European Union has some of the strictest water standards in the world, yet reliable access to safe water can no longer be taken for granted. Research conducted over the past fifty years has revealed that groundwater contamination is far more widespread and harmful than previously believed. Additionally, the ever-increasing contamination by anthropogenic pollutants—those caused by human activities, including hazardous chemicals that did not exist or were barely recognized as contaminants a few years ago—create risks for human health and the environment that remain widely underestimated. From PFAS and pesticide residues to microplastics, many of these contaminants are highly persistent, difficult to remove and enormously costly to recover from.

In this context, the European Commission increasingly frames water resilience as a strategic priority, notably through initiatives like the EU Water Resilience Strategy. Focused on enhancing both water security and competitiveness, the Strategy aims at better implementing the EU water acquis. This includes the Water Framework Directive, whose implementation on the ground has remained unsatisfactory. However, as polluting activities continue to threaten safe water supplies, a contradiction emerges: while the EU recognises water as strategically important, it still governs pollution in ways that fail to prevent contamination at its source, ultimately undermining long-term resilience and public trust.

Water as strategic infrastructure and emerging contaminants
As the UN’s 2024 World Water Development Report reaffirms, water underpins public health, food systems, energy production, economic activity and social stability. Access to safe and sufficient water is therefore inseparable from questions of security and resilience.

This understanding is reflected in the European Commission’s Water Resilience Strategy released in June 2025, which states that ‘Water resilience is a matter of security and crisis preparedness for the EU. Water is a basic need and a critical resource’. The Strategy pursues three key objectives: restoring and protecting the water cycle, building a water-smart economy, and securing clean and affordable water and sanitation for all at all times.

When it comes to restoring the water cycle and addressing emerging contaminants, the Strategy falls short of its own ambition. Although PFAS and nutrient pollution are identified as key threats, the strategy ends up only focusing on reactive measures, placing high hopes in future technological breakthroughs for detection and remediation.

Taking the regulation of PFAS as an example, the need for reduction of PFAS at source is only briefly mentioned in a small footnote: ‘The actions on PFAS remediation set out in this Strategy complement the Commission’s efforts to address PFAS emissions at the source under the chemicals legislation REACH’. While REACH has already succeeded in restricting certain PFAS in firefighting foams, a significant part of the problem remains unresolved. Under REACH, a proposal for a ‘universal PFAS ban’ is currently in the legislative pipeline. This proposal is meant to tackle PFAS at its source, but risks to be substantially diluted by all the exemptions and derogations likely to be granted in order to limit disruption for industry. Notably, PFAS in pesticides has been excluded from the scope of the restriction, despite being a major source of contamination with a particularly direct pathway into water systems through soil application. Instead, PFAS in pesticides are left to be addressed under sectoral pesticides regulation, leaving gaps in regulation and weakening water resilience.

Overall, the Strategy largely focuses on adaptation, monitoring, remediation, and water treatment capacity. Much less attention is given to preventing contamination before it enters freshwater systems. This is reflected in how contaminants are further regulated. Yet resilience cannot depend indefinitely on expensive or hypothetical purification technologies compensating for continued pollution. Sooner or later, this technocratic posture will run up against environmental limits. In the meantime, it will continue affecting how safe people feel about the water coming from their own taps.

When citizens stop trusting the tap
The consequences of this reactive approach are already visible in practice. As contamination becomes more widespread, authorities are facing situations where ensuring water supply conflicts with maintaining water quality. In Belgium, more precisely in the province of West Flanders, concerns over the presence of triazoles in drinking water have been causing quite the scandal over the past few months. Triazoles are products resulting from the degradation of fungicidal pesticides used in agriculture and industrial processes. Tests conducted by De Watergroep, the regional water supplier, showed that the triazole levels exceeded legal limits. Despite this, De Watergroep emphasized the necessity of continuing to extract water from these sources to ensure supply. As a consequence, Flemish authorities approved a derogation allowing significantly higher concentrations of triazoles in drinking water for three more years, reportedly up to ten times the European standard.

One may argue that such a decision by the Flemish government leads to the normalisation of contamination. Instead of addressing pollution at its source, this decision appears as an adjustment of acceptable thresholds in order to accommodate an increasingly polluted reality. But maybe the deeper issue lies elsewhere. Cases such as these illustrate how years of environmental neglect coupled with intensive industrial activity and a blind reliance on pesticides for agriculture cause the erosion of trust in the institutional capacity to protect our common drinking water resources.

This erosion of trust is not abstract. Inhabitants of the region are turning to bottled water from supermarkets rather than relying on tap water, even if that means paying a higher price and suffering the minor inconvenience of transport. This matters, because trust in drinking water is ultimately trust in public infrastructure and in the institutions responsible for preserving it. As Eurofound notes, trust is essential for social cohesion and democratic stability. When citizens begin privately compensating for perceived regulatory failure, resilience becomes individualized rather than collective. Public concern about chemical pollution contributes to the wider trend of decreased institutional trust both in the EU and in national governments. According to a recent Eurobarometer survey, 78% of Europeans believe the EU should take additional measures to address water-related problems, while more than half consider current protections against hazardous chemicals insufficient.

Preventing similar situations from multiplying in the future will require EU policies that place greater emphasis on pollution prevention, reducing the likelihood that authorities are forced to manage contamination through derogations once water resources are already affected.

The risks of simplification
Questions of public trust and water resilience cannot be separated from the current deregulation wave affecting EU environmental policy. The von der Leyen II mandate has already been marked by a series of initiatives aimed at reducing regulatory burdens in the name of competitiveness, including the weakening of due diligence requirements and the simplification of sustainability reporting obligations through so-called “Omnibus” packages, making it a fruitful period for industries seeking to reduce their environmental obligations.

The next stop on the simplification omnibus is the Water Framework Directive, the main EU law for protecting and improving the status of Europe’s waters. As part of its RESourceEU Action Plan and its broader objective of strengthening the EU’s strategic autonomy, the Commission has announced its intention to revise the Directive in order to improve access to critical raw materials. The proposed simplification would notably relax the principle of non-deterioration and broaden the scope of Article 4(7) derogations, allowing mining projects to proceed even where they risk adversely affecting water quality. This has raised serious concerns regarding its implications for the protection and long-term quality and availability of drinking water sources. Water suppliers, among others, are warning that weakening core safeguards of EU water law risks undermining both environmental protection and legal coherence. The concern is not limited to environmental outcomes. It also concerns institutional credibility: if fundamental water protection standards can be adjusted whenever they conflict with industrial or geopolitical priorities, the EU risks eroding trust in its capacity to govern essential public goods.

The way forward: prevent rather than accommodate
If water is truly a strategic resource, EU policymakers must treat pollution prevention as a matter of long-term security rather than regulatory inconvenience. This is clearly not the case today, as illustrated by the continued challenges in addressing PFAS contamination, the use of derogations to manage pesticide-related water pollution, and the pressure to relax water protection safeguards in the context of critical raw materials. Protecting water at source means establishing strong restrictions for harmful and persistent chemicals to enter our markets, strengthening accountability of polluters, and ensuring coherence between environmental objectives and broader policy initiatives to preserve institutional trust on which effective water governance depends. Otherwise, Europe will continue to invest in managing symptoms while neglecting causes. ‘Mopping with the tap open’, as the Dutch so fittingly would put it.