The EU loses one in four litres of treated water. Can digitalisation fix that?

As droughts intensify across Europe, causing water shortages, ageing pipes are accelerating the depletion of the bloc’s water supplies.

Europe loses 23 percent of its non-revenue water (NRW) to leaks, which is water that’s extracted and treated but never reaches households. NRW levels vary from 6 percent in the Netherlands to 45 percent in Bulgaria, resulting in costly reactive repairs.

In 2024 alone, 67 percent of monitored EU properties had leaks, losing 772 million litres of water (equivalent to 300 Olympic-size swimming pools) and costing more than €3 million. Of the 19.3 billion litres monitored in 2025, 1.47 billion (equivalent to 9.8 million bathtubs) were lost to leaks, according to the Finnish company Smartvatten.

Digitalisation can help fix this. AI shifts utilities from “periodic inspection and reactive intervention towards continuous monitoring, predictive maintenance and proactive management”, explained Durk Krol, Executive Director of Water Europe.

A low priority

Most of Europe's 4.4 million kilometres of drinking water and 2.6 million kilometres of sewer networks, built post-war, remain outdated. Temperature shifts, ground movement, and water chemistry have weakened pipes, now causing failures.

“Much of Europe’s water infrastructure is underground, so it remains politically and publicly invisible until something fails”, Krol said. “Pipes are also long-lived assets, often expected to remain in service for many decades, while tariffs and public budgets have not always covered the full cost of operating, maintaining and renewing them”, he added.

The cause of deferred maintenance runs deeper, said Hildegard Bentele, MEP of the Group of the European People's Party (EPP) and Chair of the MEP Water Group in the European Parliament. Europe has never valued water, treating it as a cheap, readily available resource. “Water was not previously considered a strategic priority – an issue that the Water Resilience Strategy is now addressing”, she explained.

This neglect now accelerates water scarcity as heatwaves spread across Europe. “Droughts are principally driven by prolonged rainfall deficits and higher temperatures. But leaks reduce the amount of usable water available, making the effects of droughts more severe and causing them to translate into water scarcity more quickly”, Krol warned.

Still falling short

The 2026 EurEau report shows a slight decrease in Europe’s water losses to approximately 23.5 percent, down from 24 percent in the 2021 report. Water service providers invest about €36.6 billion annually in infrastructure, reflecting a 17.5 percent increase from 2021. This breaks down to just €82.38 per person each year.

Member states still face maintenance backlogs, competing priorities, poor cost recovery, and limited project capacity, Krol noted. For Bentele, low water tariffs (as low as €1.5 per cubic metre in Romania) compound the problem.

In Europe, water pricing remains politically sensitive because water is a human right and an essential service, but “keeping tariffs artificially low can defer necessary investment and transfer higher costs and risks to future users”, Krol warned.

Fragmentation makes maintenance even more challenging. Germany and France each have over 5,000 water providers, EurEau reports. For Krol, many are too small to shoulder investments alone, lacking expertise, digital capacity, economies of scale, and access to finance. But regional cooperation, shared services, common data systems, and project aggregation can help address these issues, he added.

The real issue is who should pay now, Bentele said. For Krol, the fix isn’t just higher bills but recognising water’s true value to the economy, health, and energy security. This involves using tariffs, taxes, and public funding in infrastructure, industrial, and investment decisions to ensure reliable services and protect vulnerable households, he added.

AI “makes invisible losses visible”

Building new capacity in the water sector and renewing infrastructure is important, but digitalising pipes is key to reducing NRW. The core benefit, Krol said, is that “digitalisation can make invisible losses visible” as leaks tend to be subtle and ongoing, making them costly precisely because they go unnoticed over time.

Real-time leak-detection systems flag network failures. Acoustic monitoring detects leaks from underground noises. AI-powered pressure management automatically adjusts pipe pressure to reduce bursts, while district metered areas (DMAs) divide networks into smaller areas to detect leaks.

AI also helps utilities to reduce climate-driven water stress. “AI can improve drought preparedness by combining satellite observations with data from weather stations, ground sensors, groundwater monitoring and reservoirs. It can provide probabilistic warnings weeks or, under suitable conditions, months ahead”, Krol said.

According to Krol, AI tools reach their full potential when water data is openly shared. Water Europe pushes for an EU-wide Digital Single Market for Water Data and Water Operations, working as a “trusted single source of truth at river-basin level, so that authorities, utilities and economic users work from consistent and validated information. This does not require centralising everything in one database. It can be achieved through a federated system that connects reliable data held by different organisations”, he explained.

But digitalisation comes at a cost

Digitalisation “undoubtedly offers significant opportunities, but it also brings certain risks”, Bentele noted. She pointed out that water utilities are part of member states’ critical infrastructure and need robust safeguards to address cyberattacks and potential algorithmic bias in digital water management systems.

Digitalisation has no price, nor a specific percentage by which it will cut leaks. “Both depend on the characteristics and starting condition of each network”, Krol said. But taking it seriously is important because the stakes for society are high.

He explained that Europe's water-intensive sectors, including agriculture, energy, and semiconductors, are worth €192 billion and could reach €1 trillion by 2030, with water demand 2.6 times higher. Without a reliable, well-monitored water supply, these sectors can face production limits, as output depends on consistent water availability. Investments are discouraged and supply chains disrupted.

Without digital monitoring, leaks and pressure drops can go unnoticed until pipes burst, causing water outages or system failures and increasing repair costs for households. Tap water is generally safe thanks to monitoring and pressure control, Krol explained, but networks can let bacteria in, harming water quality and health if not constantly monitored remotely.

Avoiding digital oversight also harms the environment. Water must be abstracted, treated and pumped, using energy and chemicals. “When it leaks, these resources and the associated emissions are also wasted”, Krol noted. According to Eurostat, a 1 percent water loss increases energy use by 3 percent and releases around 119 million tonnes of CO2. “The real test of digital investment is whether it delivers measurable results: water saved, failures prevented, energy use reduced and infrastructure life extended”, Krol told Euronews.

Reporting from euronews contributed to this story.