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- Reducing use and abstraction: cutting water consumption and loss
New approaches to wastewater management: drawing on the EU’s experience to promote good water management in Armenia
The EU4Green Recovery East programme, launched in 2025 and financially supported by the European Union, aims to support five countries in the EU’s Eastern Partnership (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) in their green transition.
It tackles a major dual challenge facing these countries: the need to modernise wastewater treatment infrastructure, whilst coping with rising energy costs and often limited public budgets.
On this second point, a catalogue setting out European best practices in the treatment of wastewater and the recovery of by-products has just been published.
With regard to the first component, a strategic capacity-building mission on sanitation was carried out in June 2026 in Armenia by Benoît Fribourg-Blanc, an expert from OiEau.
Indeed, EU4Green Recovery East supports Armenia’s rapprochement with the EU, in particular by harmonising its water regulations with European environmental standards.
In order to promote the country’s economic development, it is important to reduce the discharge of untreated wastewater so that other stakeholders can benefit from water of sufficient quantity and quality for their activities.
This initiative centred on two crucial components aimed at ensuring sustainable and eco-efficient water management.
Roll-out of water accounting and regional consultation in Syunik
The first focus of the mission was the implementation of a methodology for drawing up water accounts, based on the UN’s SCEE-water system (in french), which enables the precise quantification of water volumes exchanged between the environment and the economy in order to guide policy decisions and sectoral development choices.
To this end, Benoît Fribourg-Blanc met with local stakeholders and the Water Committee of the southern Syunik region, an area specifically chosen because its administrative and hydrographic boundaries align closely, thereby ensuring the reliability of cross-referencing the data collected.
Training and practical experience in sanitation
The second part, held in the Yerevan region, focused on sanitation awareness with a view to preparing for a scaling-up of the country’s efforts in this area.
A one-day training session brought together fourteen participants from ministries and statistical offices to discuss the operation of a sanitation system, in line with the requirements of European directives on urban waste water treatment – a priority given the current low level of infrastructure and the need to prioritise available national funding.
To compare theory with the reality on the ground, the workshop concluded with an educational visit to the Ararat wastewater treatment plant – a facility that has only just been built, is still awaiting administrative authorisation to commence operations, and provides a concrete illustration of the treatment stages at a standard plant such as those due to be rolled out across the country.
By laying these fundamental foundations for resource optimisation and pollution control, this dual mission is already calling for new actions on the ground, which will continue during the final quarter of 2026.
FAQ
Water accounts: find out more
‘Water accounts’ are a statistical assessment system that brings together hydrological and statistical data within a common framework based on standard economic accounts.
In practical terms, this approach is based on the SCEE-water (Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting System for Water), an international tool developed under the auspices of the UN.
This system makes it possible to track water resources with the same rigour as money within a business, by creating ‘account books’ that measure water flows between the natural environment and the economy in terms of volume (in cubic metres) and value (in euros). They thus record the volumes of water abstracted from the environment, used within the economy – including exchanges between stakeholders – and discharged back into the environment, and compare these with economic indicators such as value added.
They can also be applied using the same logic to the quantity of pollutants generated by economic activities.
Water accounts are primarily used to identify inconsistencies between the datasets produced by different stakeholders and collated in the accounting matrix, thereby improving the reliability of the data produced by each party.
They are then used to define well-informed water policy strategies, which is essential, particularly for regions facing water scarcity.
They serve three main objectives:
- To prevent ‘water bankruptcy’: they act as a warning signal to ensure that water abstraction does not exceed nature’s capacity to replenish water supplies.
- Making fair and eco-efficient decisions: by comparing a sector’s water consumption (agriculture or industry, for example) with its true economic weight, they help policy-makers make equitable investment choices, rethink subsidies, and anticipate the impacts on employment.
- Speaking a common language: this standardised international method enables an objective comparison of water management performance across different countries.
To ensure reliable measurements, the method first requires either a territory whose administrative boundaries correspond exactly to its hydrographic boundaries, or the ability to determine water inflows and outflows between the territory under study (country, region) and its neighbours.
Once this framework has been defined, the measurement method is organised around the four pillars of the SCEE-eau:
- Physical flow accounts: these track the path of water by measuring withdrawals from nature, the volumes consumed (or evaporated) by the economy, and the volumes returned to the environment after use.
- Asset accounts: these assess the stock of water available in reservoirs (lakes, rivers, groundwater) at a given point in time (T), by calculating inflows from rainfall and losses over the course of the year.
- Emissions accounts: these measure water quality by quantifying very precisely the pollutants (nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals) discharged into it as a result of human activity.
- Economic accounts: these link water to the financial sphere by measuring the costs associated with sanitation, investment in infrastructure, and the distribution of charges (taxes, price per cubic metre, subsidies) amongst users.
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