Ricky Firmansyah, 26, could not remember the last time his neighborhood in Baleendah, Bandung was not inundated during the annual rainy season.
Although his house was spared, the high waters cut off road access to his home year after year.
“My commute stretched from the usual 20 minutes to three hours because I have to take a detour,” he said. He said the flood could reach three-meters deep.
Hendrawan, emergency and logistics head at the Bandung Natural Disaster Mitigation Board, said Bandung has three flood-prone areas: Banjaran — Pameungpeuk, Majalaya and Baleendah — Bojongsoang — Dayeuh Kolot.
“The floods are caused by sediment in the Citarum river and its tributaries, which is most likely caused by deforestation upstream,” he said.
While the downstream areas are flooded, people living upstream face a different challenge.
Atang M. Nasir, a resident of Cikawao in Majalaya regency, West Java, said his village had struggled to get water to irrigate their vegetable patches since the 1990s.
“We still have water reservoirs, but they are shrinking. As a result, we can only have one crop a year, while we used to have two a year,” Atang said, looking weary during last week’s water reservoir conservation plan meeting in his village.
As one area along the Citarum river needs water and others are inundated with it, the government and communities are working to make both ends meet.
To help improve the upstream condition, the government is working with Cikawao village, named after the Cikawao river, one of the many tributaries to the Citarum river.
Located between 600 and 900 meters above sea level, the village is home to 3,000 families, of which 80 percent are farmers.
The farmers have enjoyed good vegetable crops at the expense of the forest around them.
Since the vegetables need flat soil and a lot of sun, the farmers cut down more trees and leveled the fields. The same crops that bring food to their tables are behind their depleting water reservoirs.
In a meeting with the government, villagers discussed possibilities of additional kinds of plants to open the way for a tumpang sari, an inter-cropping agricultural system.
Some of their suggestions were teak and acacia, alternated with fruit trees such as durian, mango and avocado, which could conserve water in the soil.
“The farmers plant trees at a certain perimeter and grow vegetables between those trees,” Atang said.
Other ideas include changing from vegetables to coffee, which is safer for the environment as it does not require flat soil and has high economic value, and shifting from farming vegetables to farming livestock.
Sunardi, from the Public Works Ministry’s research and development board, said his office helped the villagers draft their spatial and agricultural planning to help improve the water reservoir.
He added that Cikawao village had 10 water sources in the lower part of the village, but the villagers did not benefit from them.
“There are choices, either building a pump to get the water to the village or creating water reservoirs in the upper area,” Sunardi said.
Cikawao village is the pilot project to improving the Citarum river conditions. Sunardi said the village was chosen because it was already under the fostering program of the Balai Besar Citarum, the river development office.
He hoped that there would be more villages joining the inter-crop project along the river, adding that the project would commence during the rainy season to ensure success.
Deforestation, however, is not only a problem in Cikawao.
Dede Juhari, an activist from Communities Care for Water Reservoirs (MPSA), a local NGO, said that when he returned to his village in Kertasari, Mount Wayang from his work in Kalimantan in 2002, he saw that deforestation due to the farming was significant.
“There were two things I could do: I could either plant trees or cut more trees down so the central government would notice. So, I took the second option,” he said.
He then took farmers to work on the upper area.
While his method may seem extreme, it worked, and the government issued a joint ministerial decree signed by seven ministers to revitalize the area, and Dede joined the project.
“I have been making water catchment wells since 2003. So far, there are 1,847 wells in Kertasari,” he said.
