“It is possible to reduce [water] losses in a year or two by doing the right things. Anyone who has 40 or 50% losses has no legitimacy to increase tariffs. I cannot ask that my consumers will pay more, to pay for my inefficiency”, said Joaquim Poças Martins, during the “Encontro Fora da Caixa” conference, held in Faro and organised by Caixa Geral de Depósitos.

In Portugal, there are almost 300 water management entities, 150 of them have losses above 20% and the average loss in the country is 37%, said the water management specialist.

“It makes no sense to have water supply systems with 50% losses. To reduce losses to 20% you don't need money. There are no excuses for not lowering your losses. With management measures, you can do it”, he highlighted.

The losses, continued Poças Martins, “are not a disease”, but “are a symptom of two things: either poor management or lack of dimension. Both things can and should be resolved.”

The former Secretary of State for the Environment, in the last Government led by Cavaco Silva, also guaranteed that “in the coming decades, the Algarve will not have a shortage of water for public supply”, thanks to the solutions of the future desalination plant in Albufeira, whose contract construction agreement was signed on Tuesday, and the intake of water from the Guadiana River by Pomarão, in the Alentejo municipality of Mértola.

“It’s a good solution, but it’s still a management defeat”, said the expert about the desalination plant, which he considered “debatable”, because “it might not have been necessary”.

In addition to the 15 million cubic meters per year of water losses in the region's municipal supply systems, Poças Martins explained that, in the Algarve, there are 40 million cubic meters per year that, “happily, are released into the sea of ​​treated wastewater”, and which could be used to irrigate golf courses and agricultural land.

At the same conference, the president of the board of directors of the Water and Waste Services Regulatory Entity (ERSAR) warned that new solutions to alleviate water scarcity in the Algarve will not be available before 2026 and that the region needs to face the short term with realism.

“Even in the context of applying restrictive measures, water consumption in the Algarve in September [2024] increased substantially compared to water consumption in the Algarve in September 2023 (…) We will still have the summer of 2025 without a desalination plant and what we see, in practice, is that there is no reduction in consumption”, maintained Vera Eiró.