ACHIEVING WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD SECURITY IN INDONESIA

The report examines the tensions between Indonesia's ambitious water, energy, and food security targets and its climate and conservation commitments. Using a WEF nexus framework, it identifies how competition for land and water resources can lead to deforestation and undermine emissions targets. The analysis highlights gaps in cross-sectoral and multi-scale coordination, particularly between national mandates and local government priorities. Key recommendations include accelerating the One Map Initiative to resolve data inconsistencies, prioritizing Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) in spatial planning, and aligning fiscal incentives to support local governments in transitioning to sustainable development models.

• Resource competition between the water, energy, and food sectors can undermine sustainability targets and increase deforestation, which in turn threatens emissions goals and ecosystem resilience.
• Synergies can be achieved by prioritizing the use of degraded land for agriculture, increasing agricultural productivity, and treating forest conservation as 'natural' infrastructure to secure water supplies for energy and food production.
• Indonesia's energy security goals, specifically increasing renewable energy to 23% by 2025, create land-use conflicts as biofuels and geothermal plants often overlap with forest areas.
• Ambitious food security targets, including the expansion of agricultural land by 300,000 ha by 2019, risk driving further deforestation due to limited land availability and ongoing conversion of agricultural land to other uses in Java.
• Effective resource governance is hampered by significant data inconsistencies and a lack of reliable geospatial information across different government levels and sectors.
• There is a disconnect between top-down national planning and local realities, exacerbated by the reversal of decentralization policies that transferred natural resource management authority from districts to provincial governments.
• While Indonesia's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) identifies the need for a WEF approach, there is an implementation gap where climate strategies are not consistently prioritized within individual sector development plans.

APA

Bellfield, H., Sabogal, D., Pareira, J., Gangga, A., & Leggett, M. (n.d.). ACHIEVING WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD SECURITY IN INDONESIA. Climate and Development Knowledge Network. http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/water-energy-and-food-security-Indonesia.pdf

Chicago

Bellfield, Helen, David Sabogal, Jeni Pareira, Adi Gangga, and Matt Leggett. ACHIEVING WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD SECURITY IN INDONESIA. Climate and Development Knowledge Network, n.d. http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/water-energy-and-food-security-Indonesia.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Bellfield |first1=Helen |last2=Sabogal |first2=David |last3=Pareira |first3=Jeni |last4=Gangga |first4=Adi |last5=Leggett |first5=Matt |title=ACHIEVING WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD SECURITY IN INDONESIA |publisher=Climate and Development Knowledge Network |url=http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/water-energy-and-food-security-Indonesia.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{bellfieldndachieving, author = {Bellfield, Helen and Sabogal, David and Pareira, Jeni and Gangga, Adi and Leggett, Matt}, title = {{ACHIEVING WATER, ENERGY AND FOOD SECURITY IN INDONESIA}}, institution = {Climate and Development Knowledge Network}, url = {http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/water-energy-and-food-security-Indonesia.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }