Honorable Chairs, fellow delegates, and members of the United Nations, The delegate of Indonesia recommends UNHRC to discuss about the agenda of ‘ Protecting human rights through ensuring sanitary and reliable water supply.
‘ Water is at the core of sustainable development and plays a key role in socio-economic development, energy and food production, healthy ecosystems and human survival itself. Water also plays an important role between society and the environment, and is the key to climate change. So water is so important that it can not be separated from our lives. However, as the world’s population grows, the problem of water shortages is getting worse. Therefore, the United Nations recognized the right of every human being to use sufficient clean water for water resources and water sanitation, and made sure that everyone was able to use clean and adequate water.
Still, 40 percent of the world’s population already suffers from water shortages. Worldwide 2. 1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water supplies, and 4. 5 billion people lack safe sanitation. Therefore, the United Nations needs to pay attention to the world’s major problem of water shortages and take responsibility to solve it. Just as many other countries are experiencing water shortages, Indonesia has it, too. Along with the water shortage, Indonesia, which doesn’t have enough clean water, once suffered from a water problem. Low-income residents in Jakarta have suffered greatly from the use of clean water due to inadequate water supply due to privatization.
Some residents of low income families had to buy expensive drinks from street vendors to settle their drinks and should take a bath in a polluted public well. Therefore, Indonesia’s Supreme Court ordered residents in Jakarta to resume public water supply after discovering this. The court ordered the government to immediately revoke the contract with the private water supply facility and return responsibility for the public water supply facility to the vendor. Also, we are trying not to disenfranchise low-income residents of water and sanitation anymore.
Indonesia is mainly developing infrastructure to prepare for the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta. Infrastructure development involves securing water resources, whose main project is developing 49 reservoirs and constructing related facilities worth 10 million hectares. As a result, Indonesia is making a great effort to secure enough water resources. One example of our efforts is the rain water harvesting system, which collects rainwater and secures clean water in securing scarce water resources. Because of the high rainfall and clear rain in Bandung, we applied this system to a campus in Bandung.
This system was able to overcome the water shortage in the dry season, and reduce floods in the wet season. And thanks to this system we could use rainwater more efficiently, and secure enough clean water. Water is the most important factor in our lives and the resource to be guaranteed. But, in the world there are lots of people that is not guaranteed enough water.
In response, the United Nations should consider about the people who are not guaranteed enough water and prepare some countermeasures for them. Thank you.
