Program to change our water ways

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Mon, 03/22/2010 10:16 PM

The UNESCO office in Jakarta is working with the Public Works Ministry and the Asian Development Bank on a pilot project along the Citarum River basin in West Java on a program called SWITCH-in-Asia, a press release made available on World Water Day said Monday.

SWITCH, a program for Asia, is a collaborative action research and demonstration program designed to encourage the development of sustainable cities with respect to water use.

The program aims at providing better services to all people, to prevent water quality destruction via optimizing recovery and reuse schemes, the release said.

“The current water practices have proven to be grossly inefficient and unsustainable. We need to radically rethink the way we live and deal with water,” said Hubert Gijzen, director of UNESCO’s regional science bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

“We can no longer afford to deal with water issues in a fragmented, ad hoc and incident-driven manner,” he said.

A paradigm shift in water use also applies to those who have access to water, Gijzen said. As an example, he said, many households unnecessarily used clean purified water to flush their toilets.