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Water accounting in IndonesiaTopic
FieldWater accounting and water resources information
JurisdictionIndonesia
Principal instrumentsUU 17/2019, Pasal 54; PP 30/2024, Bab IX
Principal institutionsMinistry of Public Works; Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources; the national meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency; regional water resources agencies

Water accounting in Indonesia is the recording and reporting of how much water enters, is stored in, is allocated from, is taken from and leaves a river basin or groundwater basin in Indonesia, and of the rights and permits under which it is used.[1] Neither Undang-Undang 17/2019 on water resources nor its general implementing regulation, Peraturan Pemerintah 30/2024, uses the term; they provide instead for an integrated water resources information system, and PP 30/2024 requires the water balance (neraca air) to be inventoried in planning and taken into account in zoning the use of water sources.[2][3][4][5]

The information system is a network rather than a single database. Hydrological, hydrometeorological and hydrogeological information is assigned to different agencies, which must collect it, make it accessible, publish it periodically and validate data from outside government, so that surface water and groundwater are recorded by different ministries.[6] The quantities that a water account records also appear in allocation and in licensing, where the statute treats the right to water as a right to an allocated quota and where abstraction is metered and taxed by volume.[7][8][9]

The Serayu-Opak water accounting pilot, whose inception workshop in May 2026 was co-hosted by CRPG with the national development planning ministry and Australian and Indonesian research partners, is presented as a pilot for a national rollout of water accounting. CRPG's reports of the workshop recorded a distinction between the water balances already prepared by basin agencies and a fuller account of rights, allocations and abstraction, and reported that participants named fragmented data as the leading barrier and described planning cycles that do not align.[10][1:1][11]

Pasal 54 of UU 17/2019 requires the central and regional governments to manage a water resources information system within their competence. The system is a network of information held by various institutions, which must be accessible to those with an interest in water resources, and the government, water resources managers, legal entities and individuals are responsible for the accuracy, correctness and timeliness of the information they supply. The information covers hydrological, hydrometeorological and hydrogeological conditions, water resources policy, infrastructure and technology, the environment of water resources, and related social, economic and cultural activity. To make the system efficient, each institution is to optimise the use of data, including the hydrology, hydrometeorology and hydrogeology information system, integrate its management, divide roles clearly between institutions, and regulate data access, data flow and data use.[2:1]

Chapter IX of PP 30/2024 implements that provision. The minister, other ministers and agency heads, governors, and regents and mayors manage an integrated water resources information system, which is a network of information held by ministries, agencies and regional offices at river-territory and national level; the system comprises the information itself, its infrastructure, and the agencies that manage it.[3:1] The elucidation lists the water balance among the hydrological information the system holds, alongside rainfall, the volume, discharge and quality of water in water sources, sediment and water levels.[12]

Responsibility is divided by type of information. Hydrological conditions, water resources policy, infrastructure and technology are managed by the ministry and regional offices responsible for water resources; hydrometeorological conditions by the non-ministerial agency responsible for meteorology and geophysics; and hydrogeological conditions by the ministry responsible for energy and mineral resources and the regional offices responsible for groundwater.[6:1] Each managing agency must collect, process and provide data accessible to all interested parties, update and publish information periodically, validate data coming from outside government or from individuals, and disseminate it, under guidelines that must at least standardise data formats, field data collection and the compatibility of data-processing systems.[6:2][13] The division assigns surface water and groundwater data to different ministries, the second of them the ministry that regulates abstraction under groundwater regulation in Indonesia.

Water balance in planning and allocation

The water balance enters decision-making at two points in PP 30/2024. The inventory of water resources that precedes each river-territory management plan must collect data on the water balance and on the quantity and quality of water resources, together with the environment, water sources and infrastructure, institutions, and social and economic conditions.[4:1] Planning the zones for the use of space in water sources must observe the water balance, among other principles.[5:1]

Allocation follows. The designation of water allocation (peruntukan air) in each river territory must take account of the carrying capacity of water sources, population and its projected growth, the calculation and projection of water needs, and existing use; it forms part of the draft management pattern and plan, is coordinated through the river territory's water resources coordination body, and is fixed by the minister, governor or regent or mayor.[8:1] The statute behind it treats the right to water as a right to obtain and use an allocated quota rather than a right of ownership, and fixes an order of priority in which daily basic needs, smallholder agriculture and business use that supplies drinking water systems come first.[7:1] The relationship between such quotas and the claims people hold over water in practice is the subject of water tenure, and the supply systems that draw on those allocations are treated at drinking water supply regulation in Indonesia.

Abstraction records and valuation

The licensing and tax instruments of the field generate records of the volumes actually taken. Under Peraturan Menteri Energi dan Sumber Daya Mineral 14/2024, groundwater business permit holders were required to fit a water meter at the well outlet and, above 10 cubic metres a day, to report every six months with their monthly abstraction, six-monthly quality analysis and monthly water-level measurements.[9:1] The provincial taxes on abstraction are levied on volume-based values: Peraturan Menteri Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat 15/2017 includes the volume taken among the seven components of the surface water value, and Peraturan Menteri Energi dan Sumber Daya Mineral 5/2024 raises the groundwater value progressively with the volume abstracted.[14][15]

Irrigation water is administered through separate chains of its own. Tertiary irrigation at farm level is the task of the regional offices created by Peraturan Menteri Pertanian 1/2026, which manage and develop agricultural land and tertiary irrigation.[16] CRPG's report of the 2026 workshop recorded that access to irrigation data is divided by area and by tier of government, with only the operations and maintenance directorate able to see across areas.[11:1]

The Serayu-Opak pilot

The Serayu-Opak pilot, formally Bridging Surface and Groundwater for Equitable and Inclusive Water Accounting in Indonesia, is testing an integrated framework for surface water and groundwater in the Serayu and Opak river basins of Central Java and the Special Region of Yogyakarta, and is presented as a pilot for a national rollout of water accounting within the water self-sufficiency priority of the 2025–2029 medium-term development plan.[10:1][17] CRPG is responsible for the project's desktop institutional analysis.[10:2]

CRPG's account of the inception workshop described the difference between the two exercises as the methodological centre of the project. A water balance tracks inflows against outflows for a region and period, and sub-national participants reported that basin and regional offices already prepare one. A water account, as described, traces the movement between surface water and groundwater, separates withdrawal from consumption, and distinguishes water rights from water allocated and water actually extracted. Australia's national water accounts were presented as a comparator rather than a model to be adopted, and the Indonesian framework was described as needing to integrate surface water, groundwater and rainwater, to account for unrecorded abstraction by small and medium industries, and to use the indicators of Indonesian policy, among them the National Water Security Index.[1:2] The project planned to connect the roughly fifty-four monitoring wells of the Yogyakarta-Sleman groundwater basin to the framework rather than build a parallel network.[1:3][18] The workshop also heard accounts of springs lost to riverbed mining in the Progo sub-basin, which CRPG's report framed as a question of the permits governed by mining and energy regulation in Indonesia rather than a gap in scientific knowledge.[18:1]

Data governance was the other theme. CRPG reported that the basin organisation and the two provinces work from different reference years, because the basin planning cycle and the two provinces' medium-term development plans run on different calendars, and that participants proposed 2030 as a common reference year and an open-data dashboard for the basin. Participants noted overlapping information systems, among them the hydrology, hydrometeorology and hydrogeology information system held by the Ministry of Public Works, with the national One Data Indonesia framework above them, and reported that data sharing is held back less by technology than by uncertainty over which institution owns and certifies a given dataset.[11:2] A further account recorded participants' request that the framework map which agency issues which permit and holds which dataset in the basin, a question that runs through the institutional arrangements surveyed at water resources law of Indonesia.[19]

See also

Part of a series on Water accounting in Indonesia
Serayu-Opak water accounting pilot
Identifiers Know ID K5
Categories Water management in Indonesia · Data governance in Indonesia
What links here (11)

References

  1. [E] "From water balance to water accounting: a subtle but substantive shift", crpg.id, 19 May 2026. https://crpg.id/from-water-balance-to-water-accounting-a-subtle-but-substantive-shift/ Cited for CRPG's account of the workshop discussion. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. [P] Undang-Undang Nomor 17 Tahun 2019 tentang Sumber Daya Air, Pasal 54 ayat (1)-(7). LN 2019/190. regulation_id UU_17_2019. https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/122742/uu-no-17-tahun-2019 ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. [P] Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 30 Tahun 2024 tentang Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Air, Bab IX, Pasal 121 ayat (1)-(5). LN 2024/167, TLN 6981. regulation_id PP_30_2024. https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/295844/pp-no-30-tahun-2024 ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 26 ayat (3) and Pasal 27 ayat (1)-(2) ("neraca Air, kuantitas, dan kualitas Sumber Daya Air"). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 79 ayat (3) huruf a ("memperhatikan neraca Air"). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 124 ayat (1) and Pasal 125 ayat (1)-(4). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. [P] UU 17/2019, Pasal 8 ayat (1)-(7). regulation_id UU_17_2019. ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 80 and Pasal 81 ayat (1)-(5). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. [P] Peraturan Menteri Energi dan Sumber Daya Mineral Nomor 14 Tahun 2024 tentang Penyelenggaraan Izin Pengusahaan Air Tanah dan Persetujuan Penggunaan Air Tanah, Pasal 9 ayat (2) huruf b–f and j–k. Official text published by JDIH Kementerian ESDM. https://jdih.esdm.go.id/dokumen/download?id=2024pmesdm14.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. [E] "CRPG co-hosts inception workshop on water accounting for Indonesia", crpg.id, 11 May 2026. https://crpg.id/crpg-co-hosts-inception-workshop-on-water-accounting-for-indonesia/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. [E] "Three different clocks: the quiet politics of water data", crpg.id, 15 May 2026. https://crpg.id/three-different-clocks-the-quiet-politics-of-water-data-in-java/ Cited for CRPG's account of the workshop discussion. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 122 and its elucidation, huruf a ("informasi lain terkait dengan kondisi aliran pada Sumber Air, dan neraca air"). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎

  13. [P] PP 30/2024, Pasal 124 ayat (2) and Pasal 129 ayat (1)-(2). regulation_id PP_30_2024. ↩︎

  14. [P] Peraturan Menteri Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat Nomor 15/PRT/M/2017 tentang Tata Cara Penghitungan Besaran Nilai Perolehan Air Permukaan, Pasal 3 to Pasal 9 (Pasal 6 ayat (2): the seven components) and Lampiran. regulation_id PERMENPUPR_15_2017. ↩︎

  15. [P] Peraturan Menteri Energi dan Sumber Daya Mineral Nomor 5 Tahun 2024 tentang Pedoman Penetapan Nilai Perolehan Air Tanah, Pasal 2 and Pasal 5. regulation_id PERMEN_ESDM_5_2024. https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Details/288527/permen-esdm-no-5-tahun-2024 ↩︎

  16. [P] Peraturan Menteri Pertanian Nomor 01 Tahun 2026 tentang Organisasi dan Tata Kerja Unit Pelaksana Teknis Lingkup Direktorat Jenderal Lahan dan Irigasi Pertanian, Pasal 1 to Pasal 7. regulation_id PERMEN_01_2026. https://peraturan.go.id/id/permentan-no-01-tahun-2026 ↩︎

  17. [E] "From RPJMN to river basins: how "water self-sufficiency" anchors the Serayu-Opak pilot", crpg.id, 12 May 2026. https://crpg.id/from-rpjmn-to-river-basins-how-water-self-sufficiency-anchors-the-serayu-opak-pilot/ ↩︎

  18. [E] "Once a spring is mined, it doesn't come back: voices from the Progo sub-basin", crpg.id, 16 May 2026. https://crpg.id/once-a-spring-is-mined-it-doesnt-come-back-voices-from-the-progo-sub-basin/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  19. [E] "Water flows across boundaries. Authority does not.", crpg.id, 17 May 2026. https://crpg.id/water-flows-across-boundaries-authority-does-not/ Cited for CRPG's account of the workshop discussion. ↩︎