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t a G20 session in Hamburg, Germany, last year, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo made a commitment to put in more effort to protect the environment and reduce waste dumped in Indonesia’s waters.

The President placed an emphasis on plastic waste, amid a damning report from researcher Jenna Jambeck in 2015, which ranked Indonesia second on the list of the world’s biggest plastic waste producers with 187.2 million tons, behind China with 262.9 million tons.

“We are working to reduce our waste by 30 percent in 2025 through the reduce, reuse and recycle concept, and we have set a target to reduce marine plastic waste by 70 percent in the same year,” Jokowi said during a speech at the G20 summit last year.

Fast forward one year, and the President has now gone the extra mile to fulfill his commitment to reduce marine waste, by issuing a presidential regulation (Perpres) that will serve as a guideline for ministries and state institutions.

First initiated by the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister, the regulation was signed by Jokowi on Sept. 17 and consists of a national action plan for 18 ministries to reduce marine waste.

The regulation’s implementation would be coordinated nationally, said he ministry’s maritime science and technology deputy assistant, Nani Hendiarti.

“We [the ministry] will coordinate the implementation of Perpres with the national [coordination] team, which is chaired by the environment and forestry minister,” Nani told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

Article 2 of Perpres stipulates that the national action plan will also become a reference point for citizens and the private sector to contribute to the execution of marine debris accelerated handling for eight years, from 2018 to 2025.

Point 3 of the same article states that the action plan will be divided into five strategies: increasing stakeholders’ awareness about the issue, land-based waste management, coastal and ocean waste handling, research and development as well as other mechanisms, such as funding and monitoring.

The plan comprises dozens of programs to be rolled out by each ministry over eight years.

The regulation was applauded and supported by environmentalists, including The Nature Conservancy’s director of Indonesia ocean program, Muhammad Ilman, who said it indicated that the government acknowledged the issue.

He, however, expressed concern about the approach to solve the issue as taken by Perpres, as it was deemed to be focusing more on the downstream, such as cleaning up the ocean. “Measures to solve the issue should be focused on the source of the pollution, such as investments to drastically reduce single-use plastic.”

He also pointed out that only six out of the 50 programs focused on the upstream, such as the Industry Ministry’s program to urge downstream industries to produce biodegradable and recyclable plastic products.

Nani dismissed the concerns by saying the upstream side of waste management had been taken care of last year in another presidential regulation on waste management regulation and national strategy, which was focused on land-based waste.

“The latest Perpres will fill in the gap and complement the previous one,” she said.

The Environment and Forestry Ministry’s director general for waste management, Rosa Vivien Ratnawati, who is also the coordination team’s secretary in Perpres, said more technical details on the implementation would be defined on derivative regulations, such as each minister’s regulation.