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Towards an Ethics of Water Governance and Water Management Technologies

The mission of the National Council of Ethics for the Life Sciences (CNECV) is “to re view the ethical issues raised by scientific progress in the fields of biology, medicine or health in general and the life sciences”, which gives the life sciences a broad remit that necessarily encompasses ethical issues relating to water.

In January of this year, 2026, the Council published Towards an Ethics of Water Manage ment and Use (in Portuguese), as volume 3 of the collection Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, that operates as a broadly thematic reflection, providing a concise examination of the plurality of dimensions that must be considered when addressing water – a vital and scarce resource – and the duties incumbent upon us all in its management and use.

The Council, in its 2025 Report on the State of the Application of New Technologies to Human Life, focused on the theme Technologies for Improved Access to, Recovery of, and Management of Water (in Portuguese).

This report examines both existing and emerging water technologies that contribute to increasing the availability of water, ex panding and facilitating access to it, and improving the efficiency of its management. Towards an Ethics of Water Governance and Water Management Technologies, coherently brings together these two most recent works published in Portuguese.