西班牙水工业2050：现状和发展方向

Where it stands and where it is headed Business Investment Advisory and Foresight, Strategy & InsightsJanuary 2026 Contents About Arup Future Scenarios Smart StabilityTransparent, but ThirstyDigital SpringsThirst as Usual State of PlayKey TimelineNear-term Developments Horizon Scan:Where is the sector going? About Arup Through rigorous foresight and strategicengagement, we support better decision-making, risk management and informedinvestment, helping organisations identify Arup is aglobal, independent consultingfirm, with a presence inmore than 30countries, working on the design,development and advisory of complex Within Arup, theBusiness and InvestorAdvisory(BIA) team supports public andprivate clients in strategic investmentdecision-making, market entry andbusiness model development.We provideintegrated advice across financial,economic, policy, technical, ESG and For this specific project, thetwo teamscollaborated from the outset,combiningBIA’s grounded, sector-specific perspectivewith Foresight’s future-oriented approach.This integration has enabled thedevelopment of a report that is bothstrategically robust and forward-looking, Our employee-ownership structure allowsus to set our own direction, to work withclients on ambitious projects that willset new standards. Acting as a bridge between strategy,regulation, technical reality and economicviability, we help clients manage risk,unlock value and deliver sustainableoutcomes, particularly in capital-intensive A holistic approachof Total Design Arup’sForesightteam helps clientsnavigate an increasingly complex anduncertain future. Bringing togetherfuturists, designers and technical experts,we provide long-term perspectives on Scientific and industrial Local knowledge,global expertise Introduction This report starts from a simple but critical observation:Spain’s water sector cannot be understood as a unified orcompetitive “market” in the conventional economic sense.Insights from expert interviews and sector analysis Looking ahead to 2050, the central question is therefore notwhether Spain’s water sector will “become a better market”,but whether its governance, institutional coordination andincentive structures will evolve enough to sustain theinvestments, behaviours and cross-sector alignmentrequired to secure water availability in a context of climatestress and growing competition for resources. This report consistently point to a far more fragmented reality. Pricesdo not reflect scarcity in a consistent way, incentives arefragmented across territories, and investment signals areoften distorted by subsidies, regulatory asymmetries andpolitical constraints. As a result, the performance and Against this backdrop, the purpose of this study is not toforecast demand or revisit long-standing debates onownership models or pricing levels. Instead, it seeks tounderstand how the current configuration of the system conditions what is possible in the years ahead. Bycombining sector analysis with qualitative insights from water experts, the report builds a systemic picture of how Synthesis of Current Market The purpose of this section is to bring into focus the Understanding Spain’s water sector today required combining quantitative analysis with insights from expert dynamics defining the present, where pressure points concentrate, where adaptation is already emerging, andwhich institutional and market forces exert the greatestinfluence on decision-making. By articulating theserelationships, the synthesis captures not only the state ofplay but the momentum of the system: the tendencies, interviews to capture the forces shaping the system. Ratherthan examining challenges, opportunities or policydevelopments in isolation, this section weaves them into acoherent narrative that reveals the structural logic of the This synthesis is structured to provide a progressiveunderstanding of the present. It begins with aState of Play,followed by aKey Timelinethat situates current dynamicswithin their regulatory and institutional evolution. It thenhighlightsNear-Term Developmentsalready reshaping thesector, before concluding withOpportunities and Challenges Synthesis of Current Market State of Play Water under pressure Synthesis of Current Market Key Timeline How policy, funding and weather eventshave shaped Spain’s water landscape* Synthesis of Current Market Near Term Developments Where the present sets the pace approximately 26% (ACA, 2024)1, this effectshould not be interpreted as evidence that themanagement model itself is the primary issue.Rather, it reflects deeper structural weaknesses intariff design. In particular, tariff structures areopaque andhighly fragmented across local and Ageing Infrastructure andInvestment Backlog Regulatory and GovernanceBottlenecks is focused on digitalising the urban water cycle,with the investment phase set to conclude by Q22026, potentially marking the end of this Spain’s urban water sector faces s