| Industrial centralised production sites | EDF’s Real Estate Department aimed to abandon all phytosanitary products by 2022 for all areas on continental industrial sites that are not sensitive to safety and security issues. Other entities no longer use these products (2). To date, 62% of industrial centralised production sites are committed to a zero phytosanitary product approach to meet these goals. |
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| Source substations | Ahead of its goals, and from July 2022, Enedis will no longer use phytosanitary products to maintain Source Substations, except for zones where treatment is necessary for security reasons (HVB zones). For new Source Substations, experiments are ongoing in the Aude, Aveyron and Drôme with a view to building Source Substations using Zero Phytosanitary products. |
As a manager of dams and reservoirs, and a major user of water resources, the EDF group works towards integrated and responsible water management. Dams operated by EDF in mainland France are used to store over 7 billion cubic metres of water, i.e. 70% of the volume of water artificially stored in France.
| Commitments | The Group is committed to protecting and managing water in an integrated and sustainable manner, both in terms of quantity and quality (see section 3.2.3.1 below), as well as sharing water within the territories in which it operates while fully taking into account the local water situation (multi-uses of water under growing climate constraints) (see section 3.2.3.2 below). |
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| Ocean |
The Ocean, after the Climate and Biodiversity, has become the 3rd major environmental and international theme due to related strategic, geopolitical and economic issues, particularly regarding its resources. The EDF group has built a historic link with major stakeholders linked to marine issues, particularly with the construction of the Rance tidal power plant in the 1960s, with coastal thermal and nuclear production facilities, and more recently development of offshore wind turbines or reduction of the carbon impact of ports. In 2021, the EXCOM named an EDF group “Offshore Coordinator” to define a strategy and coordinate the Group’s different entities on this theme. |
| International works | EDF participates in several international works on water (IHA Board of Directors, Board of Directors of the Partenariat français de l’eau (French Water Partnership), member of the World Water Council, etc.), and is also directly involved, as UFE representative to Eurelectric, in working groups on the Water Framework Directive. |
| R&D | Every year, several million euros are spent on R&D in the water sector. |
| CDP Water | Since 2020, CDP Water, the flagship international non-financial rating firm for water, has rated the Group among the leading utility companies in this sector (see section 3.7 "Non-financial rating"). |
Almost 99% of water withdrawn is returned to the environment. Most of the water withdrawal from its facilities is carried out in France (81%) and the UK (17%) in areas where there is no permanent water stress. Many nuclear and thermal facilities are established in coastal locations and therefore do not use fresh water.
| Assessment of exposure to water stress | The exposure to water stress of the Group’s production resources was assessed by 4 different international tools (Blue Water Scarcity from WFN, Aqueduct (3), from WRI, AWARE from the WULCA project and WEI+ from the EEA). These tools do not identify freshwater withdrawals from stressed areas in France, with the exception of Aqueduct. |
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The results of this evaluation show that:
| BWS (4) > 80% | Four nuclear power plants are located in an area of extreme water stress, but are not exposed to water-related risks because they use seawater as a cold source and therefore do not draw freshwater. |
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| 40% < BWS < 80% | Five nuclear power plants face a medium to high risk for which specific measures have been taken either at the design stage or during operation (infrastructure, water management with local stakeholders, etc.) They are therefore not faced with water scarcity risks. Thus, the Lunax reservoir was constructed from the outset upstream of the Golfech nuclear plant to prevent a possible shortage of water from the Garonne used for cooling in periods of serious drought. |
| BWS < 20 % | Three flame-thermal sites are located in a water-stressed zone for which appropriate water-saving measures have been taken with no impact on output, which is low during the summer period (in practice, drought-related prefectural decrees are issued every year during the summer). |
EDF has a hydro-meteorological centre that records local data in real time for all its power plants in order to have greater accuracy with respect to time and space in measurining water stress, which is at best a monthly average for the 4 tools mentioned above, used to assess exposure to water stress.
(1) This is an Act4Nature commitment.
(2) Cyclife, Edison, Luminus, EDF Norte Fluminense, EDF Hydro; ÉS no longer uses any glyphosate-based products.
(3) WRI Aqueduct, developed by the World Resources Institute, is a mapping tool for determining the risk associated with water resources on a global scale. Aqueduct researchers calculated 12 indicators including access to water, water stress, drought, pressure on groundwater, etc.
(4) BWS: The Baseline Water Stress – BWS is calculated as the ratio between annual water withdrawal and average annual water availability during the 1950-2010 period for 215 sub-basins in France.
