Winning the war

Winning the war
for clean water

Nirwono Joga
Chairman
Indonesian Landscape
Architecture Study Group
Jakarta

While the United States is given free rein in its ambition to
take control of Iraq and its oil refineries, an even fiercer war
is going on: The war for clean water.

March 22 is World Water Day as the world tries to cope with an
increasingly greater clean water crisis. The World Water Forum
(WWF) in Kyoto has revealed that a clean water shortage will hit
some 50 percent of the world's population in 2025. Then, 10 years
earlier, in 2015, countries with a wealth of clean water
resources would begin to export clean water to drought-ridden
countries.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has announced that
over 1.6 million children a year, mostly in the school-age
bracket will die as a result of consuming contaminated water.
Meanwhile, in Asia and the Pacific, about 20 percent of the
population faces a clean water crisis in urban areas.

About 1.7 billion people are expected to vie for clean water
daily. One in three will not be able to get safe drinking water.
One-fifth of the earnings among those of in middle income
brackets will have to be spent on clean water. The poor will have
to pay 10 times as much for the drinking water they purchase from
a supplier.

Although two-thirds of the earth is made up of water, only 2
percent of this water is clean, mostly the icebergs in the North
and South Poles. Environmentalists say non-sustainable
development projects will turn 75 percent of the earth's land
areas, including many parts of Java island, into seas.

As for Indonesia, the central and regional administrations
have never been serious enough to manage clean water. The 1945
Constitution has decreed that the earth and the water as well as
the natural riches contained therein shall be controlled by the
state and shall be utilized for the maximum prosperity of the
people.

Yet despite such high moral claims, clean water has become a
rare and expensive commodity. One liter of mineral water is more
expensive than 1 liter of fuel oil. The Jakarta administration
has even planned to raise the drinking water rate as of April 1,
2003, evidence of the government's ignorance of the difficulty
that residents experience to obtain clean water, which should be
supplied to them at no cost.

In the case of Jakarta, clean water scarcity is worsened by a
contamination of ground water that it is not safe to drink, while
the ground water reserves are decreasing rapidly.

Water in the rivers, dams and lakes also needs to be purified,
a process that requires a lot of money. In addition, water
catchment areas like lakes and ponds continue to be filled with
concrete as they are converted to housing or commercial
buildings. If this condition is allowed to continue unchecked,
Jakarta will no longer have clean water in a few years. So, how
can we save our existing clean water reserves?

One factor that ensures a continued supply of ground water is
the availability of adequate green areas which should measure at
least 30 percent of the total area of the city. City forests,
parks, botanical gardens, cemeteries, green belts along river
banks, railway lines, areas crossed by high-voltage power cables,
roads and spaces under overflies, dams, lakes and ponds
constitute a city's green open space that must be conserved.

If such space diminishes, the water to be absorbed and
accommodated as a clean water reserve will drop in quantity.

On record, Jakarta has a total area of 65,000 hectares but in
the city's 2000 - 2010 special layout design plan, the target for
the city's green open space accounts for only 13.94 percent.
Meanwhile, the green open space in fields constitutes only 9
percent. Obviously, the Jakarta administration and the Jakarta
legislative assembly do not really understand the role and
function of green areas for the environment and health and
welfare of residents, let alone, therefore, thinking about how to
provide free drinking water to all Jakartans.

The city's vulnerability to floods and the glaring shortage of
water needed during fires -- one of the recent noted cases being
the fire that destroyed Tanah Abang market -- stands witness to
the metropolitan's shortage of water.

The regional administration must prioritize the restoration of
the functions of the green areas and the establishment of new
city forests, city parks and green belts as well as the
conservation of lakes, dams and ponds.

Based on Law No. 5/1992 on cultural preservation and the
Instruction of the minister of home affairs No. 14/1988 on the
provision of green space in urban areas, the regional
administration should immediately draw up a regional regulation
on landscape conservation (of green open space) to protect
sustainability of urban green open space as a city asset.

Learning from other cities such as Melbourne, Tokyo, Osaka,
London, Paris or New York, would provide insight into how
residents can access potable water, at home and at public
facilities.

(The writer is chairman of the Indonesian Landscape
Architecture Study Group, Jakarta)