Dutch and Indonesian Research Institutes Upgrade Collaboration

Indonesia has water management problems that include land subsidence, groundwater extraction, flooding and drought. Research institutes in the Netherlands and Indonesia plan to work together even more closely to develop solutions for the near future.

Nine Dutch and Indonesian institutes were in Jakarta on Friday, 22 November. Watched by Minister Ploumen of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, they signed an agreement for a new Joint Cooperation Programme (JCP) targeting more joint research and development in the area of systems relating to water management. Indonesia is one of the five priority areas in the Dutch Water Plan.

Working together on data and forecast systems

The aim of the agreement is to bring together Dutch and Indonesian partners throughout the sector of weather and climate data, water management and safety, spatial planning and applications in agriculture.

The JCP will focus on establishing access to, and analysing, consistent data sets for water management in Indonesia (hydrological, meteorological and climate-related), studying specific problem areas such as land subsidence and groundwater extraction (for Jakarta and other locations), drainage in peatland areas on Sumatra and Kalimantan, and climate change. A forecast system for flooding and drought will also be developed.

This new agreement is an extension of the alliance between Deltares, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics (BMKG) and PusAir, which was launched in 2011. The first phase of the JCP will include work on an operational forecasting system for flooding in Jakarta, climate series for Jakarta and a drought information system.

The institutes from the Netherlands are the KNMI, Deltares, Alterra Wageningen University and Research Centre, and the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente (ITC). The Indonesian and their Dutch ‘sister institutes’ are: BMKG (the Indonesian KNMI), PusAir (Deltares), BIG (ITC) and BBSDLP (Alterra). The Badan Pengkajian dan Penerapan Teknologi (BPPT) will also be involved in the JCP. The BPPT is a non-departmental government agency working in the field of technology development.

[mappress]

Press Release, November 25, 2013