Managing water and nature in towns and villages

Urban and industrial development, a legacy of the past, has led to the artificialization of urbanized areas, permanently altering the ecological functions of urban soils, particularly their water, biological and climatic functions. This artificialization has most often resulted in impermeabilization, which is the most severe form of soil degradation. Its effects have included:

- On water functions, unbalancing the natural water cycle by drying out urban soils with a drastic reduction in rainwater infiltration, the sole source of our drinking water, with the corollary of an increase in urban runoff, almost systematically managed via unitary and/or pluvial sanitation networks, causing flooding and more or less significant impacts on the quality of receiving aquatic environments. In the basin, an annual average of 60 million m3 of effluent (a mixture of wastewater and rainwater) is discharged untreated at storm overflows directly into aquatic environments;

- On biological functions, considerably reducing the life present in these soils and their capacity to support biodiversity, the few vegetated open-ground spaces in urbanized areas being most often disconnected from each other, without ecological continuity;

- On climatic functions, considerably reducing the …