Munich asks residents to save water — while keeping the numbers to itself

Munich has decided that private pools are a luxury the city can no longer tolerate and that gardens should drink less as well. The official justification sounds familiar enough: consumption is said to be unusually high, groundwater levels historically low, and restraint therefore unavoidable. The problem is not the policy itself. It is the arithmetic behind it — or rather the fact that the arithmetic is being kept out of sight.

The city, led by Mayor Dominik Krause of the Greens, points to peak consumption of 370 million litres. Yet whether that figure is truly exceptional cannot be checked with the material Munich has released so far. To make the claim meaningful, one would need daily values from previous summers, ideally adjusted for population growth. That is precisely what NIUS asked the Stadtwerke München for after the climate and environmental department sent the request along. The answer was a classic municipal manoeuvre: too much work for the requested data, but here are some annual averages instead.

Annual averages are a convenient substitute, especially when summer demand is the issue and winter consumption is far lower. They tell the public very little about whether Munich is facing an actual shortage or simply a hot spell that made the administration nervous. The published groundwater data are no more illuminating. They show low levels over many months, but no sudden collapse just before the restrictions came into force. The same applies to the figures from the Mangfalltal, Munich’s main source area: the series has been broadly stable since autumn 2025, with the usual short-term swings after rainfall.

The utilities have at least disclosed some operational numbers. On 14 July 2026, they said, the Mangfalltal delivered an average of about 2,600 litres per second, while the Loisachtal may supply no more than 500 litres per second under water law rules. Together, that makes roughly 3,100 litres per second. Additional water is also drawn from the Munich gravel plain, but the current output from that source — and thus the total amount available to the city — was not disclosed. Asked for a concrete assessment of the system’s overall capacity, the utilities declined. Their reasoning was that drinking water is part of critical infrastructure and that any detail revealing performance, reserves or vulnerability would not be published for reasons of supply security and public safety.

That argument has a certain bureaucratic elegance. It also leaves the public with a neat paradox: restrictions are imposed in the name of transparency and necessity, while the evidence supporting them is treated as if it were a state secret. The natural spring flow in the Mangfalltal reached its lowest June level in recent years in June 2026, at around 2,200 litres per second, roughly 400 litres below the June figures for 2022 and 2025. Yet even that does not prove a supply emergency. It describes one source area, not the resilience of the entire system, and it says nothing about whether other sources can make up the difference.

The same fog surrounds the alleged savings from the measures themselves. The utilities admit that they have no systematic insight into how residents actually use drinking water, which makes it impossible to quantify the effect of pool bans or watering limits. Munich also has not answered a request about how much water is saved by switching off ten ornamental fountains, or on what calculations the public claim of 43 per cent savings rests. The Baureferat first said it was still researching the matter, then asked for more patience. In municipal language, that usually means the figures are either unavailable or inconvenient.

So Munich is asking its citizens to cut back, while withholding the very data that would show whether the restrictions are proportionate, effective or merely politically tidy. One can call that caution. One can also call it an administrative habit that treats accountability as a nuisance. For a city that wants to regulate private water use, that is a rather revealing posture.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com