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Bali's worsening drought is blamed on tourists using more than half its water

Bali has seen arrivals soar in recent years - Muhammad Fauzy/NurPhoto
Bali has seen arrivals soar in recent years - Muhammad Fauzy/NurPhoto

The tropical paradise of Bali is on the brink of ecological collapse, experts have warned, with more than 90 per cent of the island affected by drought.

As the Indonesian destination, popular with luxury travellers, honeymooners and gap year voyagers alike, awaits its overdue wet season, locals have warned that rivers have run dry, rice paddies lay barren and water tables are depleted.

Bali, Indonesia’s most popular tourist island, has seen visitor numbers soar in recent years - in 2010 it welcomed 2.49million arrivals; last year it was 6million - and there are concerns that its growing allure is exacerbating the problem.

Stroma Cole, a senior lecturer in tourism geography at the University of West of England, said: “It’s ludicrous that a tropical island is running short of water.”

He told Al Jazeera that tourism’s impact on water resources was the elephant in the room. Still, the Indonesian government is keen to replicate Bali’s success across the country in a bid to increase tourism receipts.

The drought is threatening Bali's rice paddies - Credit: getty
The drought is threatening Bali's rice paddies Credit: getty

“Bali's freshwater scarcity problem is only expected to get worse unless there is a paradigm shift in the mass tourism model and [authorities] embrace quality sustainable tourism,” he said. In 2010, when visitor numbers were less than half they are now, Indonesia’s Environmental Protection Agency said that tourism used 65 per cent of the island’s water resources.

The same organisation says that 260 of Bali’s 400 rivers have run dry, and that the water level in Lake Buyan, its largest reservoir, has fallen 3.5 metres and is suffering salt water intrusion. “A fresh water table lost to salt water is one of the rare ecological conditions which is not reversible,” it said in a 2015 report.

Amid the drought affecting 50 million people across Indonesia, local authorities in Bali have been accused of corruption and diverting water away from stricken villages.

“The government has built pipelines to divert water up there from the central lakes, but there's no water flowing in the pipes because of a lack of funding and corruption that impacts every level of government in Bali,” Vibeke Lengkong, from local charity I’m an Angel, told the news organisation.

“They talk about providing the basic needs of the people, but then they go and sell huge amounts of water to companies like Coca-Cola and Danone-AQUA that have big factories in Bali."

She said that the average tourist uses between 2,000 and 4,000 litres of water a day, a figure that takes into account use in luxury resorts and villas, as well as in swimming pools, gardens, golf courses and construction work.

The Balinese government has begun to take action, building new dams and digging wells, while the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) says it has distributed 105,000 litres of clean water, mainly to people in the Karang Asem district to the east of the island.

The rainy season traditionally begins in November, bringing relief to a region that has not seen rainfall since April, however this year’s El Nino weather phenomenon could have pushed its arrival back to as late as January.

The drought has threatened the traditional way of life in various parts of the island, including the “subak” irrigation system used for Bali’s rice crop and normally verdant paddies.

“I believe Bali is in real danger,” said Anton Muhajir, a local journalist familiar with the water crisis. “Some of my friends have had to move from their ancestral homes in Denpasar because the water in their wells has turned salty.

“At Jatiluwih, where thousands of tourists go each day to see the most beautiful rice terraces of Bali, farmers are using plastic pipes to pump in water they have to buy in the south because the springs in the mountains are drying up. And now we have drought, not just in Bali but in nearly every province in Indonesia."

Tourists have already been blamed for a rise in rubbish on Bali - Credit: getty
Tourists have already been blamed for a rise in rubbish on Bali Credit: getty

Cole said the government needs to address the balance between resources and tourism growth.

“Water from the lakes can be equitably distributed across the island, or it can be massively overused for tourism, as is happening now,” she said. “They're damming rivers to divert water to the south whereas they could be directing it up north. The villages up there aren't dry because of drought. They're dry because of politics, because of choices that are being made."

This is not the first time tourism growth on the island has caused consternation. In 2017, authorities declared a “garbage emergency” after several of the island’s most popular beaches were inundated with a rising tide of plastic waste. Workers sent in to Jimbaran, Kuta and Seminyak beaches, among the busiest, were carting off up to 100 tons of junk each day at the peak of the clean-up.

The IDEP Foundation reported “two metre waves filled with trash” on the island several years earlier.

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