The government wants to reduce the number of water service providers to create larger operators capable of plugging the holes in the country’s water distribution system. Where, despite the abundant winter rains, dispersion reaches up to 40 percent and the reservoirs in the South are almost empty.
Gruyère invasions, billions of liters of water that end up in the sea instead of irrigating the sun-baked countryside, dams that have been abandoned or have been under construction for over a century. Then old pipes leaking due to lack of maintenance, interrupted water networks.
It is the priority of every government and every summer it returns promptly with the explosion of drought. We wonder why after a rainy winter, even with storms and river flooding, the water emergency returns on time.
The Meloni government with the Minister of the Environment, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, seems intent on giving a decisive response to this critical issue. “Our objective is to reduce the number of water service managers because this means more robust operators, a managerial management capable of making investments and amortization plans that use modern tools such as digitalisation to cope with a water system that has losses of over 40 percent,” said the minister. The problem would be addressed at the root, i.e. by eliminating the myriad of local realities of water system management which have so far failed.
The national scenario is dramatic. In Sicily there is the paradox of the inability to collect large rainfall and of having to empty the dam basins because they cannot handle the water pressure above a certain threshold. But even the virtuous regions of the North-West, which have the least dispersion due to more careful maintenance of the pipes, are unable to cope with the most violent rainfall which is only stored in a small part.
Italy is very rich in water with rainfall exceeding 300 billion cubic meters annually, however, due to infrastructure deficiencies, it is only able to retain 11 percent of it. A dripping tap can waste around 10 thousand liters of water in a year. Imagine the aqueducts that are over half a century old. 60 percent are over 30 years old and 25 percent are over 50. According to Istat statistics, every year around 8 billion cubic meters of water are released into municipal distribution networks, but of these only around 4.7 billion actually reaches users with a loss of 3.4 billion cubic metres, or 9.3 million cubic meters thrown away every day. It is a volume that corresponds to 42 percent of the water introduced into the networks. The problem is not just the aqueducts. The whole network is in disrepair.
There are dams that have been under construction for decades and basins full of debris. The Pappadai reservoir, in the Taranto area, is one of the great unfinished ones. Built between 1994 and 1997, the dam remained abandoned for over 30 years and only last April did the Central South Reclamation Consortium hand over the works for the recovery of the systems. Another case is that of the Rendina dam, near Lavello in Basilicata. Built in the late 1950s, it was emptied in 2005 due to static sealing problems. Therefore, its reactivation has been awaited for twenty years. It could contain up to 20 million cubic meters of water. In September 2025, the decree was published, signed by the minister of infrastructure Matteo Salvini, which finances the functional recovery of the dam, with over 113 million euros from the Pnrr.
An attempt to modernize the water network was made with the Galli law of 1994, which wanted to mark the transition from fragmented management at the level of individual municipalities to industrial and integrated management. To overcome the myriad of thousands of small municipal aqueducts, the national territory has been divided into ATO (optimal territorial areas), each of which is managed by an area body that plans the investments.
The law established that for each ATO there must be a single manager (public, private or mixed). The objective was to create a few, large industrial “champions” capable of making structural investments to reduce losses. The implementation of this law was slow, partial and geographically patchy due to local resistance. The administrations, often for a series of reasons ranging from the search for consensus to the inability to counter some forms of local economic power but also simple ignorance of the problem, have opposed attempts to “expropriate” the management of water networks. Despite these difficulties, the law is still active and was transposed into the Consolidated Environmental Law of 2006. Today, thanks to Pnrr funds, attempts are being made to accelerate the process of modernizing the network and the project announced by Pichetto Fratin to reduce the number of operators goes in this direction.
Anbi, the national association of reclamation consortia, public economic bodies that manage an infrastructure of 231 thousand kilometers of natural and artificial canals, has proposed a plan to improve the efficiency of the water network which envisages the construction of 10 thousand reservoirs by 2030, of which 400 are executive. «The reservoirs are ready to collect and store quality rainwater and wastewater to recharge the aquifers and make it available for drinking use, to produce electricity, to host photovoltaic panels that do not impact land consumption and to produce hydroelectric energy», explains the general director of the Anbi, Massimo Gargano. Why are mayors reluctant to lose control over their territory’s water supply? «Simple, water is too often an instrument of political power» he comments. Then he recalls the paradox of the Verdura river in Sicily, where millions of cubic meters of fresh water end up in the sea during flood periods, while the local reservoirs are empty and agriculture and tourism suffer those droughts of which we still have recent memory. «Another paradox is spending money on desalination plants rather than creating multifunctional reservoirs that provide hydrogeological security to citizens». He then adds that “the country’s objective must be to collect at least 30 percent of rainwater against the current 11 percent”.
Yet consumers are lulled into the illusion that this resource is unlimited. Only 22 percent of Italians believe the World Resources Institute’s predictions that Italy will be in a situation of water stress by 2040 are true. So much so that water consumption in our country is higher than the rest of Europe. We are in first position (between 150 and 350 liters per inhabitant per day, against an EU average of 125) and in third place on a global scale. Above us only the United States and Canada. But now we are at the last call to set limits and fight waste.
