The Blue Deal and Romania’s oversight
A set of recommendations for sustainable water policies at EU level.
Ana-Maria Cononovici, 24.04.2026, 14:00
The European “Blue Deal” emerged in 2023. Its activities are based on a series of opinions covering social, economic, environmental and geopolitical aspects of water, as well as water-related challenges regarding agriculture, industries, infrastructure and sustainable consumption. The Blue Deal is a comprehensive set of recommendations for a sustainable water policy for Europe as a strategic priority and has been advanced to EU member states for adoption. We discussed this topic with Marin Florian, Quaestor within the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC):
“The Blue Deal was a package of opinions delivered by the European Economic and Social Committee. The motivation underlying this package focused on an extremely important resource that I believe we treat somewhat superficially: water. In the context of Artificial Intelligence, an energy crisis and a lack of competitiveness based on very high energy prices (which Europe is feeling, and Romania even more so, because we have the highest energy prices in the EU), water is becoming an extremely important resource. Romania has considerable water resources; we have a natural framework that could put Romania in a beneficial situation from the perspective of competitive advantages. And here I am referring explicitly to water. What we did within the EESC regarding the Blue Deal was to propose a package of recommendations to the European decision-making institutions, namely the Council, the Commission and Parliament, aimed at strengthening this strategic resource for our future. The recommendations are quite numerous, and they formed the basis of the Water Resilience Strategy published by the European Commission last year”.
This Blue Deal package has had a significant and very concrete impact, our interlocutor told us, listing several of the proposed recommendations:
“First of all, we need more transparency regarding the price of water. We need more synergy between those who consume and those who consume water responsibly. Here I refer to vulnerable people and businesses that are water-dependent. We need, as we have called it, a Blue Transition Fund, a fund specifically aimed at achieving savings or generating more efficiency when we use water. To give you a concrete example of why I think Europe has erred greatly regarding the use of water resources: take the Common Agricultural Policy and take investments in farms. We invest and allocate resources to increase the competitiveness of farms, but we never look at how much water these farms consume. See how public money can negatively affect an extremely important resource. This is why we propose that every technology financed by European funds should have certain ‘Water conditionalities’. Specifically, you must be efficient in terms of water use to ensure we are more responsible when using this resource. Additionally, the recycling aspect is extremely important because, in Romania, we have industries that are extremely dependent on water”.
In Romania, it appears that industries have planned water use independently instead of having a unifying strategic approach. Marin Florian, Quaestor within the EESC, elaborated:
“We look at water as a cheap and always available resource. This is not actually the case! I’ll give you another example from the agricultural sector, because it is relevant as an industry: we have situations where we use drinkable water for irrigating fields or on farms. Yet, drinkable water is the most expensive water possible. I believe all these things should be rethought, including industrial planning, precisely to ensure a correlation between the quality level of water that one industry requires versus another. Because when we thought about ‘spatial planning’ from an industrial perspective, we did not think about this resource. However, water coming from the energy sector, which has a certain temperature, could be used to generate heat for greenhouses, for example. We have not thought about industrial planning this way in Romania, so Romania has a lot of catching up to do from this perspective. The Blue Deal is an integrated package of recommendations, extremely anchored in reality. Given that Romania has a lot of water, I believe we could invest much more, as it is a particularly interesting branch from an economic perspective, with extremely high demand in both the industrial and civil sectors in the immediate future”. (VP)
