Integrating innovative technologies and NBS for water resources management

Water scarcity and the concern of climate change risks towards water availability become the worldwide discussion, including in Timor-Leste to consider the effective platform of water sources management in ensuring sustainable development and communities' wellbeing. Having clean and secure access to water is a fundamental human right that has implications for their health, food security, economic income, and the environment itself. However, the increasing population in Timor-Leste, changing climate, groundwater perforation, and contamination are threatening the water availability and the quantity responding to communities' needs. In Timor-Leste, WaterAid is working to explore approaches to strengthen water source management together with the implementing partners Similie and PERMATIL, one of the approaches used by WaterAid Timor-Leste is integrating innovative technologies and natural-based solutions, and collaborative active participation from the community and the local leaders in our project field locations namely the municipalities of Liquiçá and Manufahi helping the community to be more resilient in managing their water sources. in Liquiçá, the integration of technologies and NBS helped to recharge around 33 new water springs, increasing their water quantity, including helping to increase the communities’ income by growing vegetables in a village called Loidahar. Achieving this success story of the community in Loidahar involved collaborative action from everyone and concrete management approaches to the valuable water sources. WaterAid Timor-Leste continues to explore the best practices and insights on fostering resilient water management approaches to ensure the sustainability and equity in water systems available to communities’ well-being. 

Together with our implementing partner Similie, we supported community-based water supply management. In total, 18 Water Level Indicators and 4 All Weather Stations have been installed across Liquiçá and Manufahi municipalities. According to the SMASA Director of Liquiçá municipality, these innovative technologies are highly helpful in monitoring the water supply to the water systems and the weather conditions to mitigate the risk of natural disasters in Liquiçá. Antonio dos Santos, Chief of Eluli GMF also added “If there is any failure in the water system, we can access the information just from our home and further organize the community to check the spring and water system.”

With PERMATIL, we implemented the NBS approach in strengthening the water source management platform in Loidahar and Hatuquesi villages of Liquiçá municipality, Fahinehan, and Bubussuso villages in Manufahi municipality. The NBS approach involve making the retention pond, check dams, terracing, and cultivating trees. This program was first implemented in Loidahar villages which making major positive changes are starting to be seen in the village. The chief of Loidahar village said, “This NBS helped to recharge around 33 new water sources in this village by the retention pond and check dams and at the same time helped to reduce the risk of natural disasters, particularly landslide”. FAS of Fahinehan also added, “we didn’t realize that NBS also has implication on climate resilience and reduce the risk of natural disaster in our village”. 

The integration of innovative technologies owned by Similie and natural-based solutions with PEMATIL have shown huge results in managing the water sources and mitigating the risk of natural disasters in project field areas in Liquiçá and Manufahi municipalities. Those positive results have implications for the many aspects at the community level. It started with the quantity and quality of water available for the community, their health, food, economic income, decreasing the social conflict and the well-being of the community.