How in Belgium there are water shortages after 3 weeks of good weather and Spain/Italy,.. where the sun always shines there doesn’t seem to be that big of an issue
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Leakage… that is my bet.
When I was living in Ireland they were transitioning from not paying water to pay for it as many countries. One of the reasons being the bad use of water by the citizens.
An independent study showed that the water system was faulty all over and it lose 30-50% of the actual capacity.
It usually rains that much in Belgium that they can waste lots.
In Spain we do not have that luxury.
There’s serious water shortages in Spain, as well. Around 30% of Spain is already desertified, and another 20% is at risk. 1/2 the country becoming desert is a pretty big deal. Rainfall in Spain has declined over the last 2 decades, and droughts are common. Underground was well as surface sources are being depleted at a rapid rate. Many in Spain are working to confront this, to varying degrees of success.
Belgium (especially |landers) has lots of people living in a very small country. So already you have high water demand. Then the water supply infrastructure is built for ‘normal’ Belgian weather (we expect rain on a regular basis) so extended periods of draught screw that up.
And of course Belgium (again, especially Flanders) is basically one big slab of concrete with barely any nature left. Any rain that does fall down goes into the sewers or evaporates. Therefore the soil doesn’t contain as much water as it needs to survive several weeks without rain, so we need to water our lawns, increasing water demand even further.
Countries with a lot of rain (I’m speaking here as a Scot – this applies in Scotland) use surface water as their mains drinking water. We have huge reservoirs that are generally brim-full of water year-round. I imagine Belgium, being coastal and more northerly, is similar. This works perfectly until you get 3 weeks or so of dry weather, especially if it’s hot so people use more water to keep cool, when the reservoirs dry up.
Compare that to France and Spain, for example, where there isn’t enough rain for that at all. So they drill the water table – this means they have water year round, but they have to keep boring deeper and deeper to access water because they’re using it faster than it replenishes.
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