An estimated 100,000 under-5s die from diarrhea-related causes every year in Indonesia. Given that nearly one-third of Indonesia’s population lacks access to safe and affordable drinking water, most of these deaths are the result of contaminated water. The lack of access to safe drinking water is compounded by the fact that upstream watersheds in many parts of the country are in dire condition, with poor management leading to devastating floods, landslides and droughts.

These are the sort of problems that ESP’s Watershed Management Team is helping to overcome. The overall objective of the WSM Team is to stabilize and improve the supply of untreated water to urban and peri-urban population centers through the promotion of sustainable ways of using land while, at the same time, conserving protected areas of high biodiversity. ESP recognizes that ensuring the availability of clean water for coming generations means protecting fragile upland sources as well as working with water distributors in the lowlands.

The Watershed Management Team is supplying integrated solutions to the country’s water problems through:

• Developing watershed management plans
• Land and forest rehabilitation
• Managing the conservation of forests and protected areas
• Encouraging policy support for watershed management

The Aceh watershed management & community-based coastal rehabilitation project
The detailed objectives of ESP are as follows:

1.In each High Priority Province, to ensure that adequate policies are adopted at the local level in each High Priority Province to recognize the tenure and/or access rights of communities to manage their forests and watershed areas, and to allow the implementation of transparent and participatory district-level management of forests, thus reducing conflict and illegal logging.

2.In each High Priority Province to bring about improvements in watershed functions in areas supplying water to urban areas and public water utilities as measured by a 50% increase in rehabilitated land (total area of degraded land where trees, commercial or non-commercial, are planted).

3.In each High Priority Province, the area of forest with high biodiversity conservation value under improved, local management increases by 50%.

4.In Aceh, improvement in watershed functions with additional focus on the coastal margin directly impacted by the tsunami, as measured by the implementation of at least 15 targeted community-based land rehabilitation activities.