Vídeo: Poluição e alterações climáticas: peritos debatem a forma de resolver os problemas da água na Europa

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[Music] hello and welcome to this special program featuring highlights of our latest debate here from EU green week in Brussels asking if it’s time to wise up about water we know that water pollution is the number one concern for Europeans according to the latest Euro barometer poll and we’ve been taking your questions and putting them to our panel of experts and here are some of the highlights let me introduce the panelists I’m pleased to welcome florf hya the director General uh for environment at the European commission Hank oink the executive director for the global Commission on the economics of water and Arno VTO the CEO of violia water Technologies thanks very much for being with us on this panel we’ got a great set of questions that we’ve had from our audience coming in let’s get started with the polling that recently came out from the European commission which found that pollution was the number one concern for Europeans um in fact 69% of them said that that was what they were worried about when it came to water um Flor are Europeans right to be concerned about water quality and about pollution I think every citizen is always concerned and should be concerned about it’s the health and the well-being and also the economic State that’s perfectly right now when I compare it into the global situation we are a little bit privileged we have have a very solid very wide um um framework of of of laws we have really seen that because of the bising water directive um you are now when I compare it to my childhood you can go and swim in certain areas and we have a an app and you can look whether or not you can can safely without any exposure to diseases swim because of bacteria or non- bacteria we have the drinking water directive we have the urban waste water directive um and we have upped these in order to also meet the new concerns because there are new concerns due to microplastics new types of pollutants that enter the water um we are highly industrialized uh obviously there are new challenges and we have to adapt our legislation to these new challenges because there what you’re talking about is kind of we’re cleaning up from the 20th century but now we’ve got 21st century concerns as well hanker are European right to be concerned about pollution yes they are water affects our health our human health uh our health for our kids that we want to bring up in a healthy environment but also health for our food systems and the combination with industrialization pollution forever chemicals me medicines in our our water Plastics and micr Plastics the image in our minds is there’s all kinds of junk in our water is that actually true though on basically it’s mostly for me how we are going to manage it uh as citizen as Industries um as a whole got some fine russels tap water there should I be worried about that I don’t think so no no no I guess but is there stuff in there that you’d actually ultimately like to take out Hank you have to really distinct the water that’s coming from your tap and the surface water and your groundw totally different conditions there uh I think we’re very good with technology and regulation to really protect our citizens for drinking pollutants but it doesn’t mean that our environment is not that risk and with that at a certain point also you’re drinking water but right now I should not be concerned about the water I drink because we have regulations in place European and and per per count for the last few decades there’s a ton of rules that have comeing and and this is one of the goods which which is the most controlled in terms of sanitaries and and else it’s the most controlled uh Goods that you are eating and drinking let me bring in a question that we got from one of our audience members actually cuz I I think it’s helpful to hear different voices in the conversation this one comes from Peter ellson who’s the founder of canal it up he actually campaigns for water quality here in Brussels this is his question hello my name is Peter wison I’m the founder of canp and here is my question what could be a reason for Brussels to get everybody behind a water quality story to really end sege overflows into the Brussels waterways and he’s particularly con concerned about sewage going into the waterways the rivers Etc which is to do with the way that the drainage system is set up AR no can you quickly kind of sketch out how that works because basically when it rains very heavily you get these overflows right it really depends on the way the drainage system was set up you have City where you have combined seare system when you are getting water from households and waste water from out souls and also rainy water which are combined and then when it’s raining too much then yes you have a flows and that happens in Brussels today that might happens in Brussels today and those overflow then the question is how are you able to treat them how which quantity quantity of water are you able to treat because what is interesting with rain water is treating the first stage of the rain water which is the heavy polluted water that when you are on the street and and the water which is washing the street but then after that you have somehow clean water to to discharge so this is finding the right uh proportion it isn’t it isn’t like that everywhere though Hank right no it’s not like everywh and but but in the combination of what we see happening events become more extreme so we have longer periods of drought and more uh heat and that means water quality actually goes down because the water quantity goes down and with heat water quality goes Downs that can Happ also here in Brussels it’s the city is heating up in the combination of these massive Cloud birds all of a sudden putting so much pressure on a system that it starts to burst and you have to rethink that if you combine storm water with sewage water and your system in a city that is a hardened surface like here you always have a problem so you have to think about nature based type of solutions where you start to capture that water before it ends up in your sewage systems I can give you an example from Belgium which really made people change that was a big floods I really was very pleased that I was in U valonia not so long ago and they handed over to me a shack of representing one mill million trees that had been planted After the flood and also hectors hectors of Hedges a nature-based solution in order to capture uh to keep the soil Slow Down slow down the water is really a an um naturebas Solutions against disaster risk all right and um action as prevention but also um in in the floods so that was unfortunately as of in the case a catastrophe a disaster triggering people to rethink all of us have great quality water you’ve already mentioned pasas we know that’s one of the things out there these kind of forever chemicals so 10,000 odd of these things that seem to be everywhere not just in the water but you’ve also got um antibiotics you’ve got hormones you’ve got industrial chemicals you’ve got cyanotoxins you’ve got Nano materials a real smers Board of of stuff that I don’t really want in my water technically Aro can you clean those things out I mean before we start making rules and everything can you actually get rid of them mean technically we need to three things in different stages the first one is to be able to Monitor and to measure that’s that’s the first thing that we need to do and that’s what coming on with pasas we are discovering pasas every every year every day measuring we doing more we doing more monitoring so doing more monitoring is getting to know better what’s inside our water what’s inside our environment and then while we are measuring we have the Technologies to remove this from the water then we will have to treat this pollution but the techn IES to remove this from water and to provide Safe Water to Citizen are existing well at the moment there were discussions about pasas can you kind of update us on that the the situation at the moment on the pasas directly we had five uh States who were asking our chemical agency the EA about a Ben and that was I think it was Denmark it was Sweden it was Germany it was Netherlands and Norway and they have put that request forward now AKA is an independent agency they are analyzing it they have made a um a consultation where many have reacted and said well I need be first because of my industrial processes others were said oh but here I have already alternatives for it so based on that um eeka will make its opinion then the opinion comes to the commission commission will have to decide that is only the scene for next year so it’s a very lengthy process let’s move on and talk about Agri culture you had some big protests here in Brussels in other parts of Europe as well by Farmers earlier this year we know that that was um politically a pretty hot topic we had a question from Jerry mavil from Friends of the Earth in Ireland asking how can EU agricultural policy be reformed to support farmers who are improving water quality and delivering environmental benefits Hank is this really something that everybody should be concerned about are there good solutions to try and F things and how do you encourage the farmers who are doing a good job yeah we should be worried about this uh second what you should not do is say single out the farmer say you’re to blame the single farmer is not to blame for the pollutants then end up in our environment it’s a system around it that we really have to change thing I’ve talked to agriculture experts who are saying like the farmers are water um users but they’re also producers of food of course and so it’s a whole system what what’s the industry point of view on this waste s on this waste water coming from food industry is very valuable and this is something we should not forget we are trying to remove things from the waste water so that it does not affect our environment but the things that we are removing are valuable can can I bring you in what how do we encourage the best Farmers to do the great job globally 70% um of the way water is abstracted for farming globally right it’s not so auge demand it’s a huge demand because for food and for food production right but globally we see and that is also too for for for Europe we will have facing more and more drought right so the idea of how to reuse water in irrigation for farming is quite important because water is so precious I mean whether it’s rain water that you capture whether it’s a water that you reuse water efficiency first is really what we have to think in all our approaches and we have to think holistically and there you can do a lot and by the way if I may say so also a lot of third countries who have been face perhaps with drought earlier on they have systems and we can also learn from each other there you talked about irrigation what comes from the sky we always you know we never think about where it comes from so this is this this this amazing thing which is water that’s why I’m so passionate about is that we think it comes somewhere from the ocean 60% of the rain from the sky comes from land that land if we look at Europe is under threat so we pollute it our biod is in Decline uh so land use policy is and so therefore Economic Development are critically linked to the fact that we’re depending on irrigation for our food system you also talking about the water cycle and we know that overarching all of this is climate change which isn’t going to go away as a problem no matter how many how hard we try it’s not going away and and we we have got to the point where people are saying we’ve broken the water cycle well we dented it we dented it um mely what do we do what’s the what’s the I mean you can’t regulate your way out of that one well you can I think it’s not a regulation not the regulation but I mean I mean I I would already already start by saying if you only look at climate change which is very abstract I mean the first thing is now to stabilize uh uh global warming uh and if we’re doing a particularly bad job at we doing at the moment yeah but but I would like to come back on nature-based Solutions and the doubling of nature uh because when we talk just uh a moment ago on the on the on the agriculture cycle and we have a whole cycle of water the the we have the the Blue Water we have the green water which are the forest the soil and everything else but we have the waste water the gray water we have other types of water which we can also put together on how we can use it better more efficiently and I like very much what Hank said we need a systemic but very integrated approach you have to link of why can I not go for win-win Solutions how can I not use um I mean change the flood planes but also go for agricultural use uh and and and and other things in urban planning so I think unfortunately the world has become more complex true but that means also we have to think a bit more um in a more broader systemic way and if we do so I think we can really go for Solutions what I what I like to really project is it’s not that that it is impossible and that’s why I’m also a little bit allergic of saying oh it’s just climate change because that is Der responsibilizing I mean you can do yourself something on uh nature degradation you can do yourself something on uh pollution can I just bring in another question that we had which was a an unusual idea to me honestly when I heard it but it was a question we had from um Charlene alberich who is from uh something called the fluctuations festival and this is her question [Music] so a kind of legal protection for your Rivers not quite sure what that would be Hank what what are we talking about here there are countries around the world that are not only considering that but are actually doing that Dominican Republic already had nature in their constitution to give it a right and they’re working on including Rivers as a specific element of that all this question about giving reverse body legal um entity it’s really raising Awareness on how much we have an impact on them and how much we uh on the way we are developing and we are arming uh those natural resources again I think it it is amazing giving a river a ride so I think it depends really where is needed or not but the awareness or the the the the ownership idea of like I take care I give you now an ex example of something very completely different in France there’s this idea of adopting a river uh for school uh classes which I found is a very very nice and very good idea because you create ownership uh and that you can do and scale up so giving legal status might be very important in some cases let’s talk about desalination it’s a very of a key word when it comes to com conversations about water because it’s used in many parts of the world here in Europe in Catalonia we have it going on at the moment a lot of the water in Barcelona if you’re going there is coming from desalination um but also they’ve got Recycling and regeneration of water where they’re pumping it back upstream and then taking it back out again are those appropriate Solutions get considering that we’ve got climate change coming we know that even here you can have a drought where it seems to rain all of the time it can still happen um Hank is desalination something that should be part of our Playbook when it comes to dealing with water problems yes and there’s a reason for that it starts with the question where and why if I’m in an arid region around the world where there’s no water around desalination in a very sustainable and an over way is part of the solution if I’m on a small island State and my freshwater bulb is being becoming salign and there’s no water around I need it for my survival but you really have to tailor it and you need the Innovations and you have to make sure that whatever you take out of that water doesn’t end up in our environment so it kills us all no it’s we this is definitely part of the Playbook once again for us it’s the last of the solution meaning that um we need to use it when we have to use it we have done massive work uh within theia in order to reduce the fact of designation you we speaking about electrical consumption we’ve reduced it drastically during the last 10 years improving membrane technology putting energy recovery device on nothing recovering as much as we can as as energy and coming up to the brain we are now monitoring how we can reuse brain recreate salt res brain Etc and and monitoring the impact of rejecting this brain into the environment so there are many solution in the Playbook which can be guided by a global framework but coming back to that it’s three on the territory that the solution needs to be done even in terms of reuse reusing water is completely part of the solution but if you are reusing too much water at the outlet of a Waste Water treatment PL this has a huge impact on the river in which you were rejecting your water before and what’s going to happen to the cities which are below you in this system what’s going to happen in terms of concentration of pollution within this River and the biodiversity within the river so this is really istic approach that we need to take there is a of solu and then you need to Define clearly what solution fits the problematic you are the challenges you are facing in your territories and another question finally that we’ve had from a viewer this is tibo cooch who’s a um school teacher from Paris who’s asking do you consider water to be a common good basically something that sort of should belong to everyone Flor what’s the point of view on that well it is a common good it’s also actually a global good but then if you combine that that gives different responsibilities I mean everybody thinks water is there at least in Europe I mean in other countries they would not but here water has no real price it’s probably the price only what we’re paying is for the service but not for the water itself the context of his question is these uh big reservoirs being built by agroindustrial organizations in France who are hoarding the water that’s the the word that he used when he was talking coming for the question like but when you look at Europe you will realize that is also not something that we can just only see in the National context we have river basins which are going across borders so you cannot I um I just say I do it on my own it’s just a public or national good so water is really going everywhere and therefore is no borders if you look at the hydrological cycle as a global common good yes at the public good you have to regulate it on the nation level and here in the European Union of course on the European level I mean we have um we all know that we have resource depletion and we have uh scarcity of resources there will be a run on resources now what is the most important resource for all it’s water well that’s all we have time for but you can watch the full onehour debate on euronews.com and please let us know your views on water quality issues where you live using our EUR news social media channels