Water is a vital resource for our health, our ecosystems and our economy, with uses in agriculture, industry and the energy sector. Ensuring that we have enough clean, safe water, without disturbing the balance of nature, is in everyone’s interest.

SNCF Group accounts for around 0.1% of France’s water consumption, and around 3% of consumption in the French industrial sector. That’s very little for a business our size. But water is an asset we all share, and we can’t deliver rail service without it—which makes this increasingly scarce resource doubly important for us.

Together, employees across SNCF Group have committed to measures that will cut our water extraction by 10%. These actions include:

• using high-precision tools to improve detection of water leaks
• adopting carefully defined alert levels to guide our response to drought
• limiting water uses to the bare minimum, such as washing rolling stock, equipment and facilities, and watering green spaces
• collecting and reusing rainwater
• encouraging everyone at SNCF Group to adopt simple, everyday habits that save water.

At SNCF Group, we use water primarily to:

• maintain and clean trainsets
• maintain and improve track and green space, and clean service vehicles, stations and other facilities
• provide drinking and plumbing water for our customers and employees
• fight fires

In 2022, France endured a historic drought, and groundwater levels failed to recover the following winter, when the country went a record 32 days without rain. To conserve this increasingly scarce resource, the Energy Transition Ministry adopted a resilient, coordinated water management plan that calls for cutting water extraction 10% by 2030. Though SNCF doesn’t rank among France’s major water consumers, we want to be a part of this nationwide campaign. Our goals are to cut extraction 10% between 2023 and 2030 and 25% by 2035, in the 100 sites in France that consume the most.