Water infrastructure at the Mediterranean’s inflection point: Financing resilience for an industrializing, digitalizing region

November 10, 2026 • 9:00 am ET Hassan Tolba Aboelnga Bottoms lines up front The Mediterranean basin is entering a period in which infrastructure and institutions will determine the effects of water scarcity.Agricultural water security remains a central concern, while industrial, urban, and digital activities are adding new pressures.Bolstering the region’s water infrastructure requires shifts in how governments, financiers, and development institutions approach the problem. Executive summary The Mediterranean basin is entering a period in which infrastructure and institutions increasingly determine whether physical water scarcity becomes a binding constraint on economic development. For decades, the dominant narrative about Mediterranean water scarcity has centered on agriculture: irrigation demand, food security, and the slow depletion of aquifers and rivers. That narrative remains true but is no longer complete and no longer the most useful frame for policymakers and investors deciding where to put capital in the next five years. An additional, potentially fast-growing source of pressure is emerging: the water and energy footprint of industrialization, construction, and digital infrastructure. Ports, petrochemical and manufacturing corridors, tourism-driven coastal construction, and a wave of data center investment across North Africa, the Levant, and southern Europe can place concentrated and growing demands on water systems that were designed for an earlier economic structure. Industrial and digital water requirements can be continuous and concentrated near cities and industrial zones, although their timing and intensity vary across facilities; agricultural demand also varies across crops and locations. That coupling means water planning in the Mediterranean can no longer be separated from energy planning or from the siting decisions of private investors. This report argues that closing the region’s water infrastructure gap requires three shifts in how governments, financiers, and development institutions approach the problem. First, infrastructure planning needs to incorporate industrial and digital demand within existing water-energy-food-ecosystems approaches, without diminishing agricultural water security. Second, financing needs to move decisively toward blended structures and public-private partnerships (PPP) that can absorb the capital intensity of desalination, wastewater reuse, and network rehabilitation, because public budgets alone are unlikely to meet the substantial water-infrastructure investment needs. Third, next-generation technology, from digital twins to advanced desalination to artificial intelligence (AI)-driven demand forecasting, should be treated as a tool for de-risking investment and extending the life of existing assets, not as a substitute for the governance and tariff reforms that make infrastructure bankable in the first place. The report gives particular attention to data centers, the newest and least understood source of Mediterranean water demand. It applies the same technical metrics that the digital infrastructure sector itself uses—water usage effectiveness and power usage effectiveness—so that policymakers can evaluate data center investment with the same analytical rigor applied to desalination or irrigation projects. It closes by situating these findings within the negotiating agenda converging on Antalya for COP31—where climate finance, adaptation, and industrial decarbonization are set to dominate discussion—and by proposing a set of policy recommendations for governments, multilateral development banks, and private investors. The report’s added analytical contribution is to distinguish three risks that conventional supply-demand planning tends to collapse into a single deficit: demand-shape risk, when continuous and spatially concentrated industrial or digital loads change the system load profile; sequencing risk, when water-intensive investment is permitted before the water and energy capacity needed to serve it is secured; and Rio-alignment risk, when an infrastructure response improves water security while shifting costs to climate, biodiversity, land, or drought resilience. A Water-Rio infrastructure alignment screen is proposed as a practical way to test these trade-offs at the project-preparation stage. View the full report Acknowledgments The Atlantic Council would like to extend special thanks to Limak Holding for its valuable support for this report. About the author Hassan Aboelnga is a distinguished expert in water security, climate change, and sustainable development, blending a robust engineering foundation with extensive international experience. He is a researcher at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where he serves as coordinator of the iWater Project. He is also the co-chair of the International Water Resources Association’s (IWRA) Water Security Bureau. related reading Explore the program Within the Atlantic Council’s longstanding commitment to strengthening the transatlantic relationship, the Atlantic Council Turkey Program conducts research, provides thought leadership, and offers a platform for strategic dialogue between the US, Turkey, and NATO allies to address the region’s toughest challenges and explore opportunities, including in the fields of energy, business & trade, technology, defense, and security. Image: Source: Pexels/Orhan Akbaba