As spring approaches, several departments are already on drought alert. Water restrictions are in effect in several municipalities.
The groundwater situation is “degraded” in France. While spring is on its way, winter was particularly dry. The rivers are at a particularly low level and, in the soil, the natural water reservoirs are, for 80% of them, at “moderately low to very” levels, warns the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research. (BRGM). “The rains infiltrated during the fall are very insufficient to compensate for the deficits accumulated during the year 2022 and to durably improve the state of the groundwater” adds the organization which fears that “the state of the groundwater [continues] to deteriorate” if the rain did not fall sufficiently in France.
Faced with this situation of a lack of water that the BRGM fears will increase over the weeks, restrictions on the use of resources have already been taken in several departments. The prefects, competent in the matter, mainly justify their decisions by the fact that “certain underground water tables have not recharged and are low for the season”, the rainfall deficit or even “the prospects for future rain [which] will not guarantee at this stage a substantial recharge of groundwater levels.
To frame the restrictions taken in the context of a drought, there are several levels, established by law, allowing more or less coercive measures to enter into force depending on the situation:
Decisions on restrictions taken by the prefects are not made at departmental or municipal level. The breakdown is even finer since the decrees are taken at the scale of… local watersheds. It is a portion of the department comprising several municipalities (but different from an inter-municipality), drawn by the watershed lines of tributaries. France is divided into six major national watersheds, but each department also has several, according to local redistricting. Here is the map of the territories currently affected by restrictions. Click on it for more details.
At this stage, almost all of the Pyrénées-Orientales are on heightened alert, several municipalities to the east of the Bouches-du-Rhône, including part of Marseille, as well as a sector of the west of the ‘Ain, on the border with the Rhône. The north of Ardèche, Drôme, the majority of Var, as well as part of Ain are, for their part, on yellow alert. The departments in gray are on simple vigilance. As for the rest of the country (the departments in white), it is, for the time being, spared by any measure.
