Challenges and opportunities to implement smart water management in the Citarum River Basin

Abstract

Citarum River, as the longest river in West Java, plays strategic roles for West Java and Jakarta. Besides it provides major source of water supply such as drinking water, irrigation, domestics, industries, through its cascade reservoirs it also produces electricity for Java and Bali. However, over the past 20 years, Citarum River has been seriously suffering from water pollution. Asian Development Bank (ADB) and World Bank recently reported that 64 % of Biological Oxygen Demand in the Citarum River is produced by domestic and municipal activities, compared with 36% from industrial or agricultural activities combined. Worse situation occurs since various solid wastes are also directly discharged into the drainage system and river which then leads to flooding. Poor sanitation infrastructures, low efficiency of industrial wastewater treatment plant, and lack of solid waste management in this case, create opportunity to improve the technologies. While some matters related to weak law enforcement, weak coordination among stakeholders and low awareness of healthy environment may offer challenges in implementing the smart water management. To deal with those issues, Bandung City as capital of West Java has taken some intervention actions. Besides re-managing the urban space, promoting the local excellence and community empowerment program have shown an improvement as regard to the people perspective and behavior for better living, in which by improving the water quality, various benefits can be gained such as less cost of drinking water production, increase yield of rice and fish production, higher efficiency of electricity generation, opportunities to enhance tourism activities, and safer biodiversity. Furthermore, financial benefit can also be obtained by introducing innovative solid waste and wastewater management such as biogas and compost production, plastic and metal recovery, and effluent reuse to avoid over exploitation of groundwater. To speed up the achievement, it is therefore crucial to involve universities not only to promote the appropriate technologies but also to find best way to educate the community.