The Value of Services for Water Catchments for Kedah Permanent Forest Reserves

Abstract

Kedah’s forest area for water catchments plays an important role as it serves the demand of water for the state of Kedah, Penang and Perlis intended for domestic, agricultural and industrial used. Forest plays an important role as water catchment not only providing water in term of quantity but also provides the good quality of clean water. This process called purification services. But, how to assess the important of the services based on its value, because most of ecosystem services are not monetized. Therefore, this paper aims to estimate regulating services value of Kedah’s Permanent Reserved Forest (PRF) as water catchment especially for domestic used. The information of 36 Water Treatment Plants (WTP) intakes data collected and information of forest land uses from National Forest Inventory (NFI) were used as data input for the analysis. A comparative analysis results the value of services for water purification services for Kedah’s PRF is RM49,140,171/year, approximately RM 21.93/hectare/year. Results show a significant impact to protect catchment areas within forest reserves for clean water.