Water security is ceasing to be a purely environmental topic. In a country with some of the lowest water resources in Europe, with advancing climate change and growing pressure from industry and agriculture, access to water is becoming a strategic resource that must be actively protected, not merely administered.
Three perspectives meet in this panel: security, environment and technology. We discuss the detection and monitoring of water quality, the protection of intakes, retention reservoirs and transmission infrastructure, and the system’s resilience to drought, flood and contamination. We are interested in solutions that already work, not only those that are planned.
Water is increasingly spoken of as both a target and a tool of hybrid operations. Contaminating an intake, a deliberately induced failure, manipulating the levels of border rivers or attacking a treatment plant’s control system are scenarios cheap for the attacker and painful for a large number of people. We take this thread up directly, together with the question of who in Poland is responsible for protecting this infrastructure and whether that responsibility is unambiguously assigned.
A separate layer is response technology: systems for treating and monitoring water quality and equipment capable of turning contaminated water into drinkable water. This is the perspective most often missing from conversations about water security: what specifically can be done when tap water stops being fit to drink — and how fast.