19 December 2013: The World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), in cooperation with the Asian Development Bank (ASB), has published an economic assessment of interventions to improve water quality in Indonesia, titled ‘Downstream Impacts of Water Pollution in the Upper Citarum River, West Java, Indonesia.’
The technical paper describes the reasons for dramatic decreases in water quality in the country’s Citarum River, a critical water supply for 35 million people in the Bandung metropolitan area and greater Jakarta region. It also assesses economic losses from deteriorating water quality, and suggests interventions for improving water quality that could deliver a two-fold economic return on investment.
The paper, conducted with financial support from the Netherlands as part of WSP’s Economics of Sanitation Initiative’s (ESI) in the East Asia and Pacific region, finds that investments of $1.5 billion for access to domestic sanitation and wastewater treatment and $172 million in industrial interventions could generate annualized benefits that outweigh annualized costs by a factor of 2.3 over a 20-year period. These benefits amount to $226 million per year from reduced costs of drinking water production, increased fish farming yields, enhanced values for real estate and tourism, and improved biodiversity. The paper describes how further measures, such as the production of biogas and compost, recovery of plastics and solid waste, and promotion of effluent reuse by industries, could generate an additional $54 million in benefits per year.
The paper also presents a six-step methodology that the study developed and tested to assess: water quality, pollution discharge, pollution reduction interventions, water quality modeling and scenarios, and benefit estimation. In its conclusion, the paper notes that water quality in the region is likely to continue to deteriorate without considerable intervention in domestic, municipal and industrial sectors. It finds, however, that upfront financing from government and external partners, alongside private sector involvement in resource recovery, could deliver sufficient financing for the effort. [World Bank Water Blog] [Publication: Downstream Impacts of Water Pollution in the Upper Citarum River, West Java, Indonesia] [WSP Website]