22 March marks World Water Day. This year's theme is the value of blue gold. Understood as the benefits that water can offer a person – whether services such as health, hygiene, happiness and psycho-social wellbeing – or as economic value: the productivity that derives from proper management, for example. A value that nonetheless stems from recognising water as a common good, collective and belonging to everyone. This is an urgent matter given the growing rush to acquire water resources on the part of private players. A blue-gold rush driven by scarcity of the resource, caused by contamination of aquifers, climate change reducing availability in certain regions, and rising demand from global industry. More and more actors are therefore throwing themselves into the market to exploit water as a purely monetary value, with the aim of privatising the resource.

In California, water becomes a financial asset

At the end of 2020, Cme Group, a global technology company serving capital markets, announced for the first time a new futures contract on the Nasdaq California financial exchange, the Water Index (NQH2O). In practice, for the first time water becomes a financial instrument, a commodity, on a par with oil or gold, with potentially risky speculative operations on the price of the resource and with direct impacts on water contracts and tariffs.

According to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to water, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, this news gives serious cause for concern. Water cannot be traded like any other commodity on the futures markets of international stock exchanges. To that end, in Italy the Forum italiano dei movimenti per l'acqua has launched a petition calling on the Italian government to take an official stance against the listing of water on stock exchanges and to pass as soon as possible the bill "Disposizioni in materia di gestione pubblica e partecipativa del ciclo integrale delle acque", currently under discussion in the Environment, Territory and Public Works Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, and also to transfer responsibility for water from Arera (the Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and the Environment) to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.

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The right price for a common good

Another of the great issues is that of the right price. Very often in Italy there is a perception of paying too much for the water service. And yet Italian households spend on average over one hundred euros a year on bottled water, often in municipalities where tap water quality is excellent.

But experts point out: paying too little for water means not investing in modernising pipes, in infrastructure resilience, or in upgrading treatment plants to make use of wastewater and extract materials and biogas from it. Without, however, losing sight of the need to guarantee fair access for all citizens, and in particular for the most economically vulnerable. Today in Italy, higher tariffs are needed (we are willing to pay more for healthy food, but not for water?) alongside protective mechanisms to guarantee the right of access to this resource. One solution could be to redirect the pointless expenditure on bottled water towards supporting the water tariff.

Looking at Europe (using a database produced by Holidu), the country with the highest tap water cost today is Norway: in Oslo, one cubic metre of water can cost as much as €5.51. The lowest, by contrast, is in Saudi Arabia, where thanks to state subsidies it costs €0.03, despite the country experiencing extremely high water stress and having invested significant resources in desalination processes. It is petrodollars that pay for the infrastructure there. In Norway, by contrast, it is citizens who pay for one of the best services in Europe.

In Italy there are many nuances. Milan pays just €0.40 per cubic metre (77 per cent less than the global average): the lowest tariff of any European city. This price is shaped by the abundant availability of groundwater and the excellent management by Milan's operators MM and Gruppo Cap. The most expensive city? Florence, where a resident pays as much as €1.90 per cubic metre. In the South, it is Naples, with an average cost of €1.29, that presents the highest bill. But according to sources we have been able to consult, the Italian average is around €2.08 per cubic metre, due to higher management costs especially in the South and in rural and mountain areas where infrastructure maintenance commands higher tariffs. In any case, the Italian average comes in at just over half the French tariff of €3.67/m³ and 40 per cent of the German tariff of €4.98/m³.

Bottled water and Italy's negative record

Italy is also the top country in Europe for consumption of bottled mineral water: 200 litres per capita per year, while the average for European countries is 118 litres. This habit has effects on environmental sustainability: globally, around eight billion plastic bottles are consumed every year (of which only one third are recyclable), with Europe accounting for 17 per cent of the total and Italy making up a significant share. Water that, unfortunately, being relatively cheap, is bought in large quantities. The highest prices are in Norway, where a budget bottle costs €1.52 and a bottle of Perrier at the supermarket costs €2.48. But the United States is no joke either, given that it is perfectly normal at a restaurant to bring water in a jug, and in a neighbourhood store in New York a 0.5-litre bottle of Evian costs €3.23, while a "low cost" bottle of water in Los Angeles won't set you back less than €1.27. In Italy, unfortunately, bottled water is available at some of the lowest prices in the world.

In Naples, a half-litre bottle can be bought at retail for €0.10, and for €0.12 in Milan. Prices comparable to those in cities such as Bangalore, Cairo, Accra or Kuala Lumpur. Even Perrier in Naples ends up costing only slightly more than in Marseille (€0.40). It is difficult to understand the reasons behind Italian consumers' ideological choices. Low trust in operators, heavy investment by the bottled-water lords in marketing, the search for "taste" in a product that is by definition flavourless. What is certain is that if tomorrow we invested all the money we throw away on bottled water to make our water network more efficient, we would give all citizens access to quality, safe and abundant water. Without breaking our backs on the stairs lugging crates of plastic water bottles.