European Water utilities environment is embedded in a context dealing with global issues such as water scarcity and technical-economic issues such as infrastructure aging. Management of drinking water supply is facing key challenges partly related to traditional water meter, such as managing capital and operational costs; water loss (also known as non-revenue water) due to leaks and other system failures; and water scarcity/conservation. The core of the solution lies in the renewed access and use of accurate data that Smart Water Metering can provide to decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments. SMART.MET strongly paves the way to a more efficient management providing for example automatic reading of the household meters and billing, real time assessment of water balance for leak detection, identification of abnormal behaviors and awareness-raising, ability to identify user-meters defaults. However, the lack of common European standards and lack of “open technological platforms” combined to the high transaction cost on the demand side create a lock-in situation in the market and determine a situation of long-term dependency of water operators on technology providers. This determines high average operating costs for water operators and users, as well as collective inefficiency related to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions on the offer side. The objective of the proposal is thus to drive the development of new technologies to manage smart metering data collection and management, driven by a group of 7 water utilities through a joint Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP). They are supported by 6 expert organizations for assessing the technologies, implement the new procurement procedures and disseminate the outcomes of the project to other utilities and solutions suppliers. The duration of the project is 48 months.

This research project involves a partnership of French engineers and social scientists who have worked in parallel on the sustainability of water public services for several years, and more generally on what can be termed 'urban water', which includes the interaction between the city and its environment. In developed countries, for the first time at the end of the 20th century, the ever growing demand of potable water stopped and was even reversed in some places, reducing the income of those utilities which were funded exclusively or largely by water bills; and this took place at the moment when sewage collection and treatment services were increasingly transferred to water bills, and when drinking water criteria became more stringent. Lastly, water services are becoming a mature industry, with no more subsidies available to reproduce the huge and capital intensive infrastructure on the long run. This new situation generates a growing distrust from some customers and citizens, and distrust is also stirred by the yet very different situation observed in large cities of the South, where a significant proportion of the poor population is still not connected to the services, or with low quality and intermittent water. Paris Water Company, one of the largest in France, is very interested in developing new analyses and foresights to face a complex and uncertain future, and decided to join this project, and to support a comparative approach on other regions, other developed and developing countries. This utility serves only down town Paris, but interacts frequently with other actors in the water supply and the waste water fields. We broadly characterise the sustainability issue with what the Eurowater-Water 21 partnership (5th framework program, coordinated by Francisco Nunes Correia) termed the 3 Es: economic, environmental, and ethical-equitable. We have already developed an application of this approach to water services sustainability, with several cases of middle and large size cities in Europe (and Brasilia, Brazil). But it is clear that research is needed on the third axis, since it is crucial for the demand side approaches that are developing today. Not only do water utilities largely ignore the motivations of people to use more or less water, but they increasingly face complex management problems, which are increasingly difficult to solve through an increase of technological sophistication. This implies a new trade-off between water services and water resources, which is part of the issue of urban water. This in turn makes a fourth issue very important: multi-level governance of urban water. On each of the 4 issues the partnership proposes to perform additional research, so as to integrate improved approaches into a foresight model. This means there are 4 core-workpackages: • What are the deep causes for water demand growth or reduction, and how do consumptions interact with tariff systems and redistributive effects ? • Can we evaluate better the present and potential policies to support access and limit disconnection to vulnerable groups, despite growing costs and prices for water services? • How is the long lasting character of water systems infrastructure taken into account in its sustainable management, and is it possible to adopt alternative and cheaper technical solutions? • What new institutional formulas can help provide a better fit between functional and institutional territories? These tasks will be realised by the partners with interaction with the Eau de Paris, but we have also identified other types of metropolitan areas which are really worth while studying. We then have identified two territorial and transversal tasks, one on other large metropolises (Bordeaux, Nantes), and one on cities with fast growing suburbs (Montpellier, Perpignan, Beziers). The core part of the research will be prepared by a year of investigation on what is already available in other developed countries. This first year will also provide the time needed to recruit the non permanent personnel like PhD students and post-docs. Then the core research will develop during years 2 and 3 or more. The final year will be used to develop the 8th and last task: it consists in using all the accumulated knowledge into a foresight approach of the sustainability of water services, which will be discussed in an important international seminar to be organised towards the end. This project is co-ordinated by Bernard Barraqué and Sébastien Treyer (CIRED – CNRS), and mobilises the UMR Cemagref GSP (Strasbourg), the UMR G-Eau (Montpellier), the water and economics service in BRGM, UMR ADES in Bordeaux University, plus two private partners, Eau de Paris, and SMASH, a small company dedicated to data analysis for the social sciences.