Indonesia Builds Dams, Water Reservoirs to Deal with Climate Change

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The government's efforts to build more dams and retention basins in Indonesia serve as concrete actions to address the threats of climate change, Public Works and Public Housing (PUPR) Minister Basuki Hadimuljono stated.

"To deal with the threats of climate change, the Indonesian Government must build more water reservoirs, be it in the form of retention basins or dams. We are prioritizing dams, so we will have a large amount of water reserves during the dry season," he remarked in Jakarta on Sunday, November 26, 2023.

Hadimuljono noted that the government aims to make dams and retention basins as essential infrastructure for reserving water.

However, he said that in terms of the number of dams, Indonesia is still lagging behind other countries, such as South Korea and China.

"As an archipelagic state, we need to think big to continue to increase the number of water reservoirs. As of late 2022, China has built at least 98,000 dams, followed by South Korea's 18,000 dams. Meanwhile, we have only built about 300 dams," he pointed out.

The minister then placed emphasis on the importance of modifying the designs for dams to enable the water reservoirs to optimally manage water, both during the dry and rainy seasons.

"It is also necessary to update the designs for the dams. All dams must have sluice gates, so we can fully optimize them during the rainy and dry seasons," he said.

He added that the PUPR Ministry continues to prioritize developing environmentally friendly infrastructure.

"For instance, we seek to build a floating solar power plant that makes use of 20 percent of the surface area of a dam. We can use such a power plant to generate as much as 4,800 megawatts of electricity in all dams," he noted.

Hadimuljono further said that the PUPR Ministry had started using 23 dams as hydro power plants.

"Currently, the amount of electricity generated by hydro power plants still only contributes to nine percent to the total of electricity generated by all types of power plants in Indonesia," he remarked.

ANTARA

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