Abstract
Everyone agrees that water is a vital resource and a precious common good; no priority can precede that of access to water. Water is described as "blue gold". Yet water insecurity is as serious a crisis as climate change. Over the last 100 years, global water use has increased sixfold due to demographic pressure, economic development and overconsumption. Increasingly scarce, this blue gold is also increasingly polluted, and is thus at the heart of a disruption of aquatic ecosystems that have been providing natural water quality treatment for millennia.
Developing new approaches to protecting water resources, preserving aquatic ecosystems, preventing sources of pollution and treating polluted water upstream, by implementing innovative treatment processes using sustainable technologies, has become a priority. Are there solutions that are natural, sustainable, eco-responsible, economically viable and designed for the long term? Recent ecological solutions will be presented.
But these solutions must not obscure the essential point, so aptly described by our guest of the day: Water comes from nature, which is why "preserving the natural environment is necessarily the best way to preserve the resource" (E. Orsenna, L'avenir de l'eau, Fayard, 2008).
