Malta’s water insecurity

MEP Thomas Bajada kicked off 2025 by showing unprecedented environmental leadership by a Maltese in the European Parliament.

As rapporteur on a crucially important initiative on water resilience, his ambitious draft report urges the European Commission to put forward bold new rules, including setting targets for water management at EU level.

One reason this is bold is that the top-down, target-setting approach by Brussels, epitomized by the Nature Restoration Law, is no longer fashionable in the new EU mandate.

His work on this, thus, deserves bipartisan support in Malta as the challenge is existential and generational.

Malta is a water-stressed country where people will be dying from extreme heat in the coming decades, according to scientific models published recently. Yet, convincing his government colleagues and Maltese stakeholders is necessary to credibly persuade the EU institutions and other member states.

A cursory look at Malta’s record on water management suggests that will be no easy feat, beyond honeyed words Bajada gave in a Politico interview on how every drop counts in Malta and how we have “a lot to export on… how to actually take care of what we have”.

Our water insecurity stems from the island’s only freshwater source being the groundwater that lies within its aquifers. The rest is desalinated seawater from an energy-intensive process that produces drinking-water quality water. That is pumped to households and industry but also used to flush all Malta’s toilets in the sewerage system. Hardly a model for circularity, energy efficiency or good practice of harvesting.

One innovation that fits the bill better is the access given to some farmers to second-class water for irrigation, a polished treated effluent that undergoes a process producing good quality water.

This allocation of “new water” alleviates the challenge most farmers face from ever increasing droughts from the climate breakdown and lessens the dependence on abstracting groundwater through boreholes, reducing the use of costly and polluting pumps.

Our groundwater aquifers are small, largely surrounded by seawater and at risk of contamination from chemical (including nitrate) pollution and, importantly, from salinity that creeps in as over-abstraction reduces the internal pressure keeping seawater out.

Growing crops for human consumption is a genuinely publicly justifiable use of privately abstracted water. Yet, some are registered and metered boreholes while a great many of those are unregistered and illegal boreholes without flowmeters or state oversight.

NSO figures on private abstraction ascribes most water use from abstraction to “agriculture” but having so many unmonitored and illegal points means this is only part of the picture.

Studies that aren’t required by the EU are few, making co-creation of policies with NGOs and stakeholders difficult. Our only ever NGO which talked expertly on water issues, the Malta Water Association, downed tools over “a tide of apathy” years ago, after its call for a comprehensive water policy framework was ignored. Since then, the ERA ran a consultation on a green paper  that received 23 responses, though that is yet to be followed up by concrete proposals.

The major user by volume in Europe, agriculture may not even be the biggest problem where behavioural or economic nudges to end wastefulness are concerned. Visiting any large supermarket shows why. Industrial users in Malta abstract groundwater for commercial use like there’s no tomorrow, handing out ‘free’ sixpacks of plastic bottles to shoppers. Water-carrier bowser companies sell abstracted groundwater for private use including filling our increasingly large number of swimming pools.

The driver for all this wastefulness is that economic disincentives remain non-existent in many member states. Bajada rightly calls on them to “implement adequate water pricing policies and fully apply the cost recovery principle for both environmental and resource costs”.

Good luck with that, as a study by the Institute for European Environmental Policy suggests in its very first line: “Water pricing has traditionally been politically and socially sensitive in Malta.”

Another challenge is the call to “accelerate the implementation and enforcement of the current legislation”. In 2010, a Labour MEP had asked the European Commission a question on this after the Maltese government had failed to provide the commission with data.

“What guarantees can the Commission give to Maltese citizens that as members of the European Union they will not lose their only source of natural groundwater through non-adherence to EC law?”

The commission’s response was that the EU Water Framework Directive requires member states to introduce water pricing and control water abstraction and that it was waiting to assess the Maltese river basin management plan (RBMP). Fast forward 15 years: Malta gets called out for delaying submission of data alongside six member states that needed infringement procedures for them to publish the third RBMP.

This failure kept the EC from drawing up country-specific recommendations for Malta or making meaningful observations in its report on water status in Europe, which Bajada’s draft report references. That report still mentions over-abstraction as a known significant issue in Cyprus, Greece and Malta.

Bajada’s struggle will be tough but necessary for Europe and for our children to have a habitable country. He boldly even listed other points that may not be popular with farmers, calling for increased monitoring of pesticide residues in water bodies and stricter enforcement of pesticide application. Malta reports 0% residues from the one surface water site it monitors.

Malta’s government needs to heed this report – which must not get politicised – by speedily and fully implementing existing water legislation without further delaying unpopular but necessary actions.

Justin Zahra

Justin Zahra is a former director of agriculture and has led the agriculture and rural payments agency. Today, he works in the climate non-profit space at EU level.