Indonesia, like many countries, faces growing problems with water. Concerns include floods, low dry-season flows, sedimentation, contamination from run-off, and rising demand among competing end-users.
Concerned suppliers and users of water at various localities around Indonesia are now experimenting with new approaches for managing watersheds. One such approach is payments for environmental services, in which water users compensate watershed land managers for land management that protects or improves water quality and flows. This report describes action research in Indonesia to take forward local environmental service payment initiatives at two sites, Brantas and Cidanau, and to spread learning more widely among interested people across the country.
There is an extensive international debate about the effectiveness of payments for watershed services and their likely impact on poverty. Should farmers and other land managers be paid for their role in maintaining watershed services? (for example, rewarding them for their role in changes in water quantity and quality and keeping the evenness of water flow in the locality). To address these questions, IIED has run an action-oriented project in the Caribbean, China, South Africa, Bolivia, Indonesia and India that has been trying to develop payments for watershed services and look at their impacts on livelihoods.
Who it's aimed at:
- Policymakers: specifically government departments who are concerned with landuse, water issues, poverty and livelihoods
- The NGO sector (who are interested in the same range of issues)
- Academia: (in particular post grads and lecturers
What readers can get out of it:
All of the three sets of stakeholders will get the following:
- Results from six countries where IIED led a practical intervention and set up relationships between the different stakeholders.
- An understanding of how complex it is to translate the relatively simple theory of payments for ecosystem services into practice
- Highlights from practical experience that show this cannot act as a tool for direct poverty alleviation but that it might have application as an 'integrator' of stakeholders in watersheds.
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