European Water Abstraction Dataset

8,226

Observations

410

Series

Subjects

1970–2024

Period covered

What this looks like

One real series from the dataset, and real rows from the head of its published extract. Neither is a mock-up: the rows below are the same rows, unchanged, that are in the file you would download.

Water abstracted for public water supply at Switzerland

The longest single series this dataset holds — 40 annual values, one of 410. The dataset is not this chart.

Drawn to show the shape and resolution of what the dataset contains, not to make a point about Switzerland. Gaps are breaks, never interpolated.

View the data behind this chart

Underlying data
Period	Switzerland (Mm³)
1970	1,140
1975	1,129
1980	1,103
1985	1,143
1989	1,167
1990	1,162
1991	1,193
1992	1,192
1993	1,066
1994	1,092
1995	1,068
1996	1,052
1997	1,056
1998	1,063
1999	1,057
2000	1,066
2001	1,036
2002	1,069
2003	1,085
2004	1,029
2005	1,004
2006	980
2007	960
2008	980
2009	967
2010	940
2011	954
2012	935
2013	917
2014	901
2015	933
2016	923
2017	931
2018	953
2019	928
2020	939
2021	914
2022	931
2023	925
2024	916

Sample rows

12 of 8,369 rows Taken from the start of observations-abstraction-eurostat-water.csv. These are sample rows, not the dataset.

Sample rows from the European Water Abstraction Dataset extract
`metric_id`	`subject_id`	`subject_kind`	`value`	`censored`	`censor_operator`	`censor_threshold`	`censor_limit`	`censor_reported`	`unit`	`period_start`	`period_end`	`period_kind`	`basis`	`confidence`	`source_id`	`source_ref`	`qualifier`	`superseded`	`retrieved`
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-alb	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2017-01-01	2017-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/ALB::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-alb	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2018-01-01	2018-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/ALB::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-alb	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2019-01-01	2019-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/ALB::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-alb	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2020-01-01	2020-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/ALB::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-alb	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2021-01-01	2021-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/ALB::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2008-01-01	2008-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2009-01-01	2009-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2010-01-01	2010-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2011-01-01	2011-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0.53	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2012-01-01	2012-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0.49	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2013-01-01	2013-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01
abstraction-volume-aquaculture	country-bel	geography	0.55	—	—	—	—	—	Mm³	2014-01-01	2014-12-31	year	reported	medium	eurostat-water	env_wat_abs/BEL::abstraction-volume-aquaculture	—	—	2026-10-01

Download these rows as CSV — the same twelve, with the column header, for testing a loader before committing to the full file.

Methodology

Collected from the Eurostat dissemination API (env_wat_abs) under the European Commission reuse policy. Every value is reported actual abstraction: Eurostat publishes no licensed or authorised volumes, so nothing here can be confused with an entitlement. Eurostat’s sector codes nest — manufacturing cooling sits inside manufacturing, irrigation and aquaculture inside agriculture — and only the leaves Hydrionis holds a metric for are stored, so a reader cannot sum a country’s sectors past its own total. The surface and groundwater split is stored for the total only, because Eurostat’s coverage of sector-by-source is far thinner than of either alone. Where a national register publishes the same quantity in more detail, the national register wins: France’s totals and sector figures come from the BNPE declarations Hydrionis collects point by point, and Eurostat’s French equivalents are deliberately not stored alongside them.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Read before relying on these figures

Abstraction is not consumption. Most of what is abstracted is returned to the environment, and this dataset says nothing about how much. No return flow is estimated.
Abstraction is not licensed entitlement. The two are separate quantities in the Hydrionis model and are never mixed; nothing in this dataset is an entitlement.
Reporting is uneven and, in practice, voluntary. A gap in a country’s series means it did not report that year, not that abstraction was zero, and a country absent from a sector table did not report that sector.
Definitions are common in principle and interpreted nationally in practice. Whether a given abstraction counts as industrial or as energy cooling varies, so a single sector should not be compared across countries without checking both national definitions.
French totals and sector figures come from the national BNPE register rather than from this source, and are on a different basis: summed from individual declarations rather than assembled for a questionnaire. The two will not agree, and only one is stored.

Coverage

Subjects	European countries reporting to Eurostat — 40 held
Period	1970–2024
Units	Mm³
Update cadence	Annually
Identifier	`european-water-abstraction` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`abstraction-volume-total`	Water abstracted, all purposes Total volume of water reported as actually abstracted from surface water and groundwater in a year, across all declared purposes.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-surface`	Water abstracted from fresh surface water Abstraction from rivers, lakes and reservoirs.	Mm³	country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-groundwater`	Water abstracted from fresh groundwater Abstraction from aquifers, through wells and boreholes.	Mm³	country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-public-supply`	Water abstracted for public water supply Abstraction for treatment and distribution as drinking water through a public supply network.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-irrigation`	Water abstracted for irrigation and agriculture Abstraction for crop irrigation and other agricultural use.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-aquaculture`	Water abstracted for aquaculture Abstraction for fish farming and other aquaculture.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-mining`	Water abstracted for mining and quarrying Abstraction for mineral extraction, including dewatering of workings.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-industry`	Water abstracted for industry Abstraction for industrial and economic activity other than irrigation and electricity generation.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-energy`	Water abstracted for electricity generation Abstraction for cooling and operation of electricity generating plant.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-services`	Water abstracted for services Abstraction by the service sector — commercial premises, hospitality, offices and public buildings — where it is taken directly rather than bought from a public supply.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-households`	Water abstracted for private households Abstraction by households from their own source, typically a private well or borehole.	Mm³	county, country, river-basin
`abstraction-volume-net`	Net freshwater abstraction Total gross abstraction less water returned to the environment without having been used.	Mm³	country
`water-returned-without-use`	Water returned without use Water abstracted and returned to the environment without having been used for any purpose.	Mm³	country

Rights and access

Licence position

Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

Eurostat — Water statistics (European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU))
Agences de l’eau / Office français de la biodiversité — Prélèvements en eau — abstraction database (Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab))

Attribution and citation

Cite and reuse →

Two different obligations, deliberately kept apart. One is a condition of somebody else's licence; the other is a request Hydrionis has no standing to enforce.

Attribution you are required to give

These are conditions of the licences the underlying data is published under. They are obligations to the publishers, not to Hydrionis, and they apply to you directly whether or not you mention Hydrionis at all.

Data from Eurostat, used under European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU). Source: Hub’Eau / Système d’information sur l’eau, under Licence Ouverte (Etalab).

Eurostat — European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU) (licence text)
Agences de l’eau / Office français de la biodiversité — Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab) (licence text)

Suggested citation for Hydrionis

Hydrionis (2026), European Water Abstraction Dataset, version 1.0.0, accessed 2026-10-05, hydrionis.com/data/datasets/european-water-abstraction/

Cite Hydrionis where you rely on the compilation, the normalisation, the eligibility judgements or a chart. Where you use an unmodified published value, the publisher’s attribution is the one that is required; crediting Hydrionis as well is welcome and is not something Hydrionis can require of you.

Recommended, not required. Hydrionis does not claim rights over unmodified public data it relayed, and doing arithmetic on somebody else’s measurements does not make them Hydrionis’s. Cite the version and the access date: European Water Abstraction Dataset changes as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without both cannot be checked later. Full guidance is on cite and reuse.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-26

First release. Actual abstraction extends from one country to forty, with a surface and groundwater split.

Additions

Annual abstraction by sector for 40 European reporting countries from 1970.
Surface and groundwater components of national totals.
Net abstraction and water returned without use, where reported.

Use this data

Download abstraction observations from Eurostat (8,369 rows) (CSV)
Download abstraction observations from Hub'Eau / BNPE (7,010 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable JSON /api/v1/datasets/european-water-abstraction.json
How to cite this, and who you must credit
How these figures were produced
Request this at a different scale, format or geography

Every bulk extract ships with a companion metadata file carrying this dataset’s version, its sources, their licences, the attribution you are required to give and the suggested citation — so the terms travel with the file rather than staying on this page.

About this data

The fields a professional user needs to judge whether this is fit for a particular purpose. Deliberately not a score.

About this data

Everything below is a property of the data rather than a rating of it. There is deliberately no single confidence score: how much a gap matters depends on what you are about to do with the series, and only you know that.

Source	Eurostat — Water statistics · European Commission reuse policy (Decision 2011/833/EU) Agences de l’eau / Office français de la biodiversité — Prélèvements en eau — abstraction database · Licence Ouverte / Open Licence v2.0 (Etalab)
How the values came to exist	Mixed across the series — the basis is recorded on every individual value.
Period held	1970–2024
Known gaps	Abstraction is not consumption. Most of what is abstracted is returned to the environment, and this dataset says nothing about how much. No return flow is estimated. Abstraction is not licensed entitlement. The two are separate quantities in the Hydrionis model and are never mixed; nothing in this dataset is an entitlement. Reporting is uneven and, in practice, voluntary. A gap in a country’s series means it did not report that year, not that abstraction was zero, and a country absent from a sector table did not report that sector.
Continuity	Version 1.0.0, released 2026-08-26. 1 recorded version; breaking changes and corrections are listed in the changelog above.
Last read from the publisher	2026-10-01 · publisher updates annually
Redistribution	Permitted by the upstream licences
Commercial reuse	Permitted by the upstream licences. No Hydrionis access tier can widen this.
Methodology	How this was produced