Sufficiency: challenges for Veolia Water France

Sufficiency has emerged as an appropriate approach for tackling water-related issues in a context marked by different challenges: a sharp spike in water stress, mostly caused by the climate crisis, but also inadequate investment in infrastructure. Given this situation, sufficiency is a useful lever for delivering short-term solutions to problems relating to water stress. It is increasingly also a necessary precondition for efforts to bolster the acceptability of industrial actors. Jean-François Nogrette discusses a range of levers for implementing sufficiency: decoupling production and distribution in business models for water management, as Veolia already does with a number of its contracts, as well as behavioral innovations in the form of helping people to change their behaviors. Useful though they are, these levers also have to be accompanied by other approaches, and Veolia does not consider that sufficiency can be a one-size-fits-all response to the challenges that water stress poses. Innovation, energy efficiency, and resource recycling and circularity solutions are all indispensable levers for making ecological transformation a reality.