Water Europe welcomes Dominique Gatel as the new co-leader of the Vision Leadership Team ‘The Value of Water’. Dominique Gatel is Director for institutional relationships/water at Veolia Headquarters.
He was for 10 years deputy technical director, and previously for 11 years head of the R&D Department for water supply. Prior to this, he has worked in the food industry (Unilever, Danone). He graduated from the National School of Agronomy in France, with a MD in food science.
The transition to a Water-Smart Society will be driven through Water Europe’s Vision Leadership Teams (VLT). The VLT ‘The Value of Water’ aims to identify, better understand, define and update the Water Europe SIRA challenges related to new socio-economic, financial and multi-stakeholder governance models based on the “true” value of water and provide recommendations for structuring and selecting real-life multi-stakeholder living lab environments.
“Valuing water is a tough exercise which is pitching its way globally and certainly in Europe. With the adoption of the Water Framework Directive, a number of academia and water directors have examined the topic with a view to feed cost-benefit analysis, but the wide majority of basins don’t use it in practice, showing there is room for improvement. At Veolia, we use on a case-by-case basis the ‘True-Cost of Water’ tool to assess the Value of Water for industrial sites beyond the mere abstraction/Discharges levies. Over the years to come, I am certain the Value of Water will become more mainstream at all level, from macro to meso to micro-scale. Happy to join this effort.” – Dominique Gatel.
