Marie-Gabrielle Reuille : Our main areas of water consumption include cleaning our facilities and service vehicles, maintaining green spaces, and supplying water to toilets—both for the public and for office spaces and for the stores. We still don’t have enough information on volumes for each of these uses, so collecting and analysing consumption data is fundamental to managing our water resources. That’s one of the goals of our Smart Station project, which calls for expanding remote data collection to 580 stations between 2025 and 2027.

M-GR: For us, conserving water is integral to corporate responsibility. In the summer of 2023, when a severe drought hit France, we put this principle to work by issuing a set of technical guidelines to operators and maintainers. These included making tenants and other station players aware of best practices for water conservation, responding within 24 hours of learning about a leak. At the end of 2023, we also carried out a thorough analysis of water consumption across our assets to start detecting leaks. In 2024, we are launching a water audit campaign in every station in order to probe further.

M-GR: Since climate change is disrupting rainfall significantly in France, we’re making sure that water-related issues are taken into account when operating and designing train stations. This means for example including the recovery and reuse of rainwater in our future station projects. Putting plants and trees outside and using permeable floor coverings helps water to infiltrate and reduces the impact of our stations on the water cycle. Finally, we’re rolling out water fountains to give our customers access to drinking water during heatwaves.