The Water Resilience Strategy is moving into its implementation phase. Investment, digitalisation, innovation and new efficiency targets are reshaping European water policy. This transformation directly affects businesses and territories across Italy and is particularly timely ahead of the Euro-Mediterranean Water Forum in Rome.
How much water does it take to produce food, a medicine, an industrial component or a microchip? And what happens when businesses can no longer take the availability of this resource for granted?
For many years, European water policy was primarily associated with environmental protection, water quality and water services. Today, that perspective is broadening. Water is increasingly regarded as a productive input, a component of economic security and a prerequisite for territorial competitiveness.
The reasons are not difficult to understand. According to the European Environment Agency, based on data available for the 2000-2022 period, agriculture, manufacturing, cooling for electricity generation and public water supply together account for 98% of water abstraction associated with the EU’s main economic sectors. Around 30% of EU territory also experiences seasonal water scarcity every year. Ensuring a reliable water supply - and, above all, using it more efficiently - is therefore becoming an increasingly important part of the conditions in which European businesses operate and invest.
It was against this backdrop that, in June 2025, the European Commission presented the European Water Resilience Strategy, with the aim of protecting the water cycle, building a water-smart economy and ensuring clean, safe and affordable water.
Just over a year later, the initiative has entered its implementation phase.
The first Water Resilience Forum was held in December 2025, while in 2026 the Commission launched a series of actions to translate the Strategy into more concrete instruments. These include developing, together with Member States and stakeholders, a common methodology for measuring water efficiency.
The European objective is to improve water-use efficiency by at least 10% by 2030. Based on the methodology currently being developed, the Commission intends to establish common benchmarks as part of the Strategy’s review scheduled for 2027.
The underlying approach is the “water efficiency first” principle: first reducing avoidable demand and excessive abstraction, increasing efficiency and promoting reuse, while considering additional supply only after the potential for savings and more efficient resource management has been fully explored.
Water reuse is also becoming increasingly important. At present, only 2.4% of wastewater is reused in the EU, with substantial differences between Member States. The Commission intends to promote wider use of treated wastewater beyond agricultural irrigation, including in energy production and industrial processes.
This transformation will require considerable investment. The European Investment Bank has launched a Water Resilience Programme, providing up to €15 billion in financing for the water sector between 2025 and 2027, with the aim of mobilising up to €40 billion in overall investment. The programme primarily targets water infrastructure and systems, including networks, treatment plants, leakage reduction and measures to make water supply services more resilient.
For businesses, the range of European instruments is broader. The Water Resilience Strategy also aims to accelerate research, innovation and the market uptake of water-efficiency technologies through programmes such as Horizon Europe, instruments supported by InvestEU, the new EIT Water, and other European innovation initiatives.
A Water Resilience Investment Accelerator is also expected to take shape in 2026-2027, involving 20 pilot cases focusing on natural water retention and water efficiency. The initiative will bring together local investors, solution providers and actors facing concrete challenges, with a view to encouraging the replication of successful approaches in other European territories.
One of the main difficulties, however, remains the scale of the investment required. The Commission estimates that the EU alone faces an annual investment gap of around €23 billion to ensure full implementation of existing European water legislation.
This is compounded by often ageing infrastructure, significant territorial disparities, insufficient deployment of available technologies and fragmented governance across administrative levels, territories and river basins. The Water Resilience Strategy therefore sets a clear direction, but its implementation will be far from automatic.
A significant part of the transformation will be digital.
In May 2026, the Commission began work on a European Action Plan for the digitalisation of the water sector, which will also include an initiative on smart metering. The objective is to make better use of data, sensors, monitoring systems and digital tools to detect leaks, optimise consumption and improve infrastructure management. The potential is considerable: according to estimates cited by the Commission, smart meters can reduce water consumption by up to 25%, while further savings can be achieved through digital management systems and the early detection of leaks.
A Copernicus Water Thematic Hub is also planned, bringing together European Earth observation data and tools relevant to water-resource management through a single access point.
By the end of 2026, the Commission is also expected to publish a European research and innovation strategy for water resilience and launch a Water Smart Industrial Alliance, aimed at supporting innovation, facilitating market access – including for SMEs – and strengthening the competitiveness of Europe’s water industry.
This ecosystem will also include the European Water Academy, promoted by the Joint Research Centre, which is entering its operational phase in 2026. The Academy aims to strengthen skills, technology transfer and public-private cooperation, while also supporting the commercialisation of innovative solutions in areas such as water reuse, precision irrigation, water treatment and infrastructure protection.
This is therefore not simply a policy for saving water. A European industrial policy for water is also beginning to take shape.
And what about Italy?
Viewed through this lens, the Italian situation takes on particular significance. In 2024, 8.87 billion cubic metres of water were abstracted for drinking-water purposes in Italy. This was the lowest figure in 25 years, yet Italy remains the EU country with the highest overall volume of water abstraction for public water supply. On a per capita basis, this corresponds to around 150 cubic metres per inhabitant per year, the second-highest figure in the EU after Ireland.
Italy’s challenge, however, also concerns what happens between abstraction and actual use.
According to the latest structural data available from ISTAT, referring to 2022, 3.4 billion cubic metres of water were lost from municipal distribution networks, equivalent to 42.4% of the total volume entering the network. This amount would have been sufficient to meet the water needs of approximately 43.4 million people for an entire year.
The latest indicators also highlight the scale of territorial disparities. In 2024, more than one million residents in provincial capitals and metropolitan cities were affected by water-rationing measures, equivalent to 5.8% of the population considered, with the most severe difficulties concentrated in southern Italy.
The 2026 White Paper “Valore Acqua” by TEHA also increasingly approaches water management from this broader perspective: not only infrastructure and water services, but also innovation, investment and the ability of territories to create the conditions for sustainable industrial development.
The key question, therefore, is not simply how much water Italy has. It is how efficiently it can use it, and how availability, infrastructure and demand differ from one territory to another.
The territorial dimension is particularly evident in agriculture. According to ISTAT data for 2024, more than 90% of Italian agricultural holdings report irrigation-related difficulties, with even higher percentages in southern Italy and the islands.
Yet this sector also illustrates a fundamental point: effective policies require knowledge not only of the theoretical availability of the resource, but also of businesses’ actual needs, the costs they face, how they obtain their water and the technologies they use.
A particularly interesting initiative was launched by the Chamber network in 2026. Through the H2O project, Unioncamere Puglia, in cooperation with Water Europe and Uniontrasporti, is collecting information directly from agricultural businesses on costs, supply difficulties and water needs. The survey starts with four pilot municipalities - Manduria, Molfetta, Nardò and San Giovanni Rotondo - and is open to agricultural businesses throughout the region.
The objective is not simply to provide a snapshot of the problem, but to build an evidence base that can be made available to institutions, while complementing data collection with dialogue among business associations, land reclamation and irrigation consortia, and other territorial stakeholders. Thanks to cooperation with Water Europe, the project will also help disseminate technologies and good practices already tested at European and international level.
This approach could have broader relevance: before defining interventions, it is essential to understand more precisely where and how water enters production processes and what businesses actually need.
This is particularly important because many of the technologies needed to improve water efficiency already exist. Sensors and smart meters can identify abnormal consumption and leaks; IoT systems can monitor water use in real time; artificial intelligence-based tools can optimise networks and production processes; treatment technologies can enable the reuse of water that is currently discharged; and precision irrigation systems can tailor water supply to the actual needs of crops.
For small and medium-sized enterprises in particular, the challenge is often to become aware of these solutions, assess whether they can be applied and identify the skills, partners and financing needed to adopt them. This is where instruments already available within the Chamber system can play an important role. The Punti Impresa Digitale (PID) can help disseminate digital technologies applicable to water efficiency, while the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) can facilitate access to solutions, expertise and technological partnerships available across Europe.
These instruments are being complemented by new European initiatives. In 2026, EIT Water, the new Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology dedicated to water and marine and maritime ecosystems, is taking shape. Established following the EIT’s selection of the Allwaters consortium, the new community brings together businesses, research organisations, universities and other innovation actors and will become fully operational in 2027. Here too, the Italian Chamber network is directly involved: Unioncamere del Veneto is a strategic partner of EIT Water and participated in 2026 in the development of roadmaps focusing on innovation, entrepreneurship and skills.
The message is clear: solutions exist, particularly at European level. The challenge is to raise awareness of them and make them accessible to SMEs.
Water resilience therefore opens up a broader area of action for the Chamber system.
The first concerns knowledge and evidence. The Chambers’ extensive territorial presence and close relationship with the business community can help identify and aggregate information on companies’ water needs that is difficult to capture through general statistics: dependence on water resources, costs, supply constraints, investments already made and technologies required. The experience launched in Puglia provides a concrete example of how this function can generate information that is also valuable for shaping public policy.
The second concerns innovation transfer. Through the PID network, EEN, cooperation with the research system and participation in European networks, Chambers can help bridge the gap between available technologies and the businesses that could benefit from them.
There is also a third dimension, more closely linked to territorial policy.
Water necessarily brings a wide range of actors to the same table: businesses, the agricultural sector, water operators, local authorities, consortia, universities and research organisations. Their interests and priorities do not always coincide, while solutions depend heavily on the characteristics of each territory. In this context, Chambers can perform a local coordination role, providing neutral platforms through which the needs of the business community can emerge, different stakeholders can engage with one another and shared solutions can be developed.
It is therefore not simply a matter of helping individual businesses become more efficient. It is also about understanding the relationship, territory by territory, between water availability, infrastructure, productive needs and prospects for economic development.
The issue will also be the focus of a major event in Italy in the coming months. From 29 September to 2 October 2026, Rome will host the Euro-Mediterranean Water Forum, an international platform bringing together institutions, businesses, researchers and civil society to discuss water security, innovation, digitalisation, artificial intelligence, water use in agriculture, reuse and improvements to water networks.
The Forum will also host the Union for the Mediterranean Ministerial Meeting on Water, reinforcing the political dimension of an issue which, particularly in the Mediterranean region, cannot be addressed solely within national borders.
The Rome event therefore comes at a significant moment. As the European Water Resilience Strategy moves from setting objectives to implementation, water is becoming increasingly central to the debate on competitiveness, investment and the future of territories.
The Water Resilience Strategy sets an ambitious direction, but the challenges should not be underestimated. An estimated investment gap of at least €23 billion per year for the implementation of existing legislation, ageing infrastructure, significant territorial disparities, the still-slow deployment of some technologies and complex governance arrangements could delay the transition and widen disparities between territories with different capacities to invest.
For precisely this reason, implementation cannot take place solely in Brussels or through large-scale infrastructure programmes.
It will require a better understanding of the real needs of productive systems, wider deployment of technologies that are already available, mobilisation of investment and stronger cooperation between businesses, researchers, water operators and public authorities.
For businesses, this means understanding how to reduce their vulnerability and use water more efficiently. For territories, it means understanding the relationship between water availability, infrastructure and productive development. For the Chamber network, it means putting its knowledge of businesses and territories, its capacity to support innovation and its ability to connect local stakeholders at the service of this transition.
After energy and raw materials, water too is becoming part of Europe’s competitiveness agenda. A territory’s ability to understand its water needs, use the resource efficiently and build shared solutions around it will increasingly become one of the conditions for producing, attracting investment and growing.