Water for Life Voices

Voices from Business

Dominique Gatel
Veolia

Dominique Gatel

"The water sector has become a lot more professional over the last 10 years. A small concrete example is Water Quality, which is now in most places monitored in a transparent manner with performance indicators, which allow tracking and shows improvements. Beyond, River Basin Management has become more real, within the EU and the Water Framework Directive (WFD), but also beyond. The second big change is the inclusion of water and sanitation as human rights in 2010. The last is more of a challenge: the scarcity of water, which triggered laughter in numerous countries (remember, Josefina [Maestu], the answer of the EU when you and a few others raised this point) in the early 2000s, which is now taken seriously by most.

Veolia has improved performance of the utilities we are involved with on all continents significantly, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, in many regards: access to water to start with, in Morocco, Niger, India -Karnataka, China and elsewhere. Water conservation has also improved almost everywhere, with substantial leakage reductions in Germany, Romania, and other countries. Wastewater collection and treatment is also a major area of improvement to which we contribute in construction as well as in operations, in a number of countries with reuse, such as Australia, Singapore, Namibia.

My hope for the future is that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do confirm that water is a goal with the suite of targets just proposed. And also that the Human Right to Water and Sanitation be subject to projects which can fly, involving more of the skills transfers, so that infrastructures are not only built but also efficiently operated and maintained over time. Lastly, I hope that Integrated Water Resources Management becomes a cross-sectorial reality in all countries. ."

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