By: Frederic Musisi
Uganda’s electoral carnival kicked off last week with presidential nominations, followed by the unveiling of manifestos and candidates traversing the country for the next 50 days to sell their message across the country. But beyond the rhetoric at the political pulpit, developments such as the environment and changing climatic patterns afflicting the country are merely footnotes in the political agenda.
Residents of Elegu town in Amuru district at the border with South Sudan have over the last two weeks been picking up the pieces from heavy floods, after River Unyama, one of the tributaries of River Nile, burst its banks, the second time in barely two months.
About 7,000 households were affected, property destroyed, and cross border trade upended. In August 2020, the floods displaced 4,000 people and left countless property destroyed.
In 2016, the town and several parts of Amuru were flagged as a disaster-risk zone with other occurrences such as heavy storms, drug resistant crop pests and diseases, prolonged dry spells, and bush fires partly exacerbated by human activity, and environmental degradation.
Still in Northern Uganda, the National Emergency Coordination and Operations Centre (NECOC) in the Office of Prime Minister (OPM) flagged the districts of Apac, Arua, Dokolo, Kitgum, Kole, Lamwo, Lira, Adjumani, Agago, Alebtong, Amolatar, Gulu, Otuke, Pader and Oyam—almost the entire region—as prone to various climate disasters.
According to NECOC’s disaster risk profiling for the country, all other regions are prone to a myriad of climate-related risks. In Eastern Uganda, the highland areas around Mountain Elgon: – Bududa, Mbale, Kween, Manafwa, Sironko, Namisindwa and Bukwo are synonymous with land and/or mudslides while the lowlands of Namayingo, Namutumba, and Paliisa, experience intermittent flash floods and droughts.
In Western Uganda, parts of Buliisa, Bundibugyo, Ibanda, Isingiro, Kamwenge, Kanungu,Kibaale, Kisoro, Ntoroko, Ntungamo, Rukungiri and Sheema, and almost all Central Uganda districts including Kampala central business district which floods embarrassingly, are all susceptible to climatic variations.
The government is already trying to rehabilitate communities affected by floods in Kasese where River Nyamwamba burst its banks as a result of torrential rains in May, and communities around Lake Albert in Buliisa and Ntoroko.
The senior disaster management officer in OPM, Pamela Komujuni told Vox Populi that government is fully aware of the situation, which partly informed undertaking the country risk profiling.
“The risk of floods and land/mudslides is high in several parts, and over the last years we have intensified our early warning mechanisms because we know the obvious triggers,” Ms Komujuni said.
“We know the areas considered the most at risk; we continue enlisting the community leaders, advising communities to relocate at what point they should. Previously, our challenge was that we did not have a comprehensive policy of evacuation and resettlement which we have now.”
Going by the resettlement master plan, Ms Komujuni said they target to relocate at least 10,000 people from particularly high risk areas—starting with Mt. Elgon and Rwenzori areas—but owing to resource constraints, “we do it in bits as and when need arises.”
Yet not much a priority
The Ministry of Water and Environment Permanent Secretary, Alfred Okidi explained that these are warning signs of climate change taking its toll.
“Climate Change refers to the intensity and severity of weather conditions; floods or droughts over a period of time, say 15 to 30 years, and environmental degradation contributes to it. We are seeing a pattern to it and models done for Uganda show that especially in the mountainous areas of Elgon and Rwenzori, the rains have increased with time hence increasing such risks.”
Mr Okidi added: “The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) put it better as to where we are headed; that wet gets wetter and dry gets drier. With the degradation happening around, cutting forests, destroying wetlands and riverbanks, these will only get worse but if we do something they can be mitigated.”
He revealed that an inter-ministerial committee chaired by the Prime Minister has since established a technical team to study the floods-drought patterns around the country and is expected to offer short, medium, and long term measures and a report will be tabled before Cabinet for action.
In the meantime, government is grappling—paying a huge price—with disaster risk management whenever calamity strikes. Besides the floods, the districts around Mt Elgon are on high alert for mudslides as a result of the above normal rains pounding the area.
NECOC and other government departments are closely monitoring a huge crack measuring about 175 meters deep that stretches through five districts on the Mt Elgon ranges. Officials say in some areas resident are trying to conceal it—covering it with grass—out of fear of being told to vacate.
A May 2019 ministry of Finance budget monitoring and accountability report details that government through the National Development Plan prioritized reduction of the impact of natural disasters and emergencies. Developing a disaster risk and vulnerability profile map of the country, and coordinating regular disaster vulnerability assessments at community level, and coordinating timely responses to disasters and emergencies is part of that plan.
However, the plan has been beset by challenges including lack of a law to govern disaster risk reduction and management, failure to operationalise the Contingency Fund for emergencies since enactment of the Public Finance Management Act in 2015 and lack of funding for local governments towards disaster management and preparedness. Government continuously spending heavily on managing and responding to disaster as opposed to managing and reducing disaster risk remains a challenge too.
Uganda, like elsewhere around the globe, is suffering from different stress levels of changing climatic patterns mainly from floods, landslides, droughts, increased crop failure as a result of changing farming seasons and drug resistant pests attacking crops, and a surge communicable diseases like malaria, development challenges not so much pronounced in political manifestos especially in Africa, ostensibly given the myriad of pressing problems at hand.
Across the world, the UN has flagged the rising sea level trends as a result of a combination of meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets, and thermal expansion of seawater as earth’s average temperature has already risen beyond 1°C (degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial period which spans 1850-1900, while the last five years have been the warmest on record.
Mr Okidi averred that some of the contributory factors to the natural misfortunes befalling Uganda are external, “but government is fully aware of the situation and is taking action” including enacting several polices from the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) of 2007 that provide a process for least developed countries to identify priority activities to respond to their urgent needs to adapt to climate change, the Climate Change Policy of 2015, and National Climate Change Bill 2020.
Talk is cheap
With the country engrossed in politics, such issues can always wait. But even usually, the political discourse around the wanton environmental degradation is hushed.
In his New Year Message in December 2019, President Museveni described, “disrespect for the environment” which has led to the several deaths especially in disaster prone areas, as the biggest problem the country is facing. He has also variously preached against wetland reclamation and deforestation only for investors to establish factories in the same locations.
For his sixth term (2021-2026) manifesto, the President’s ruling NRM party promises to focus on restoration, protection and demarcation of critical ecosystems such as wetlands and forest reserves, and embark on building a sustainable green economy.
The National Unity Platform’s Robert Kyagulanyi delves into this degradation of the environment and biodiversity somewhat in detail and pledges to do more about it.
The Forum for Democratic Change in its yet to be launched manifesto pledges to among others, introduce a greening Uganda policy, employ an army of youth in every district to plant at least two million trees per year, and scrap taxes on liquefied petroleum gas to promote transition by an additional 30 percent of charcoal users to gas.
Presidential candidate Mugisha Muntu’s Alliance for National Transformation is also promising to increase environmental conservation, plant 40 million trees over the next five years, and protect water sources, lakes, rivers, swamps and water catchment areas.
The constant in all the political promises is that the country needs some soul-searching in regard to nature conservation. According to the ministry of Water and Environment 2018 sector performance report, wetland coverage dropped from 15.5 percent in 1994 to 13 percent in 2015 with 50 percent of permanent loss recorded in the L. Kyoga and L. Victoria basins alone, while 31 percent of the remaining wetlands countrywide are degraded. Almost half of degradation (46 percent) happened in Eastern Uganda, of which 55 percent happened in L. Kyoga drainage basin.
Likewise, forest cover, mainly as a result of deforestation, declined from 24 percent in 1990 to 11 percent in 2015; the forest coverage in the country is now at 9 percent and only 12 percent is under strict nature reserve.
Not so long ago, Lake Victoria water levels swelled to unprecedented levels, since 1964, submerging villages in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania mainly as a result of above-normal rains that started last year in October/November and expansive destruction of the lake’s catchment area, especially swamps and forests, that ordinarily suck up the flow to the lake.
The overflow of the lake, the executive director of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission, the regional body charged with sustainable management of the Lake Vic, based in Kisumu, Dr Ali-Said Matano said, “led to bursting of rivers draining the lake, including River Nile triggering more flooding and damage upstream.”
Act now or pay the price later
A 2015 government-commissioned study warned that Uganda will need to “carefully” manage the impacts of climate change as average temperatures are expected to rise. The same study noted that the country will incur losses between $3b and $6b (Shs11trillion – Shs22 trillion) annually in the energy, agriculture, transport and water sectors alone by 2025 which raises big question marks on the country’s readiness to adapt.
In Mbale, the city’s environment officer, Mr Charles Wekube told Vox Populi that the district, as the entire Elgon region, is increasingly prone to different climate variations amid low prioritization of the issue.
“In the highlands we are seeing a lot of mudslides and flooding in the lowlands, erratic rains and rare crop pests and diseases, which trends have increased overtime. While growing up, and also when you ask the elderly, this was never the case,” Mr Wekube said.
He shared that both the local and central governments are “fully aware of what is happening” but that is not correspondingly reflected by the finances allocated to mitigation and adaptation programmes; leaving NGOs and development partners like UN agencies to fill the void—and their approach has been problematic.
“We are told to mainstream environment issues in all our local government work plans but look at the budgets for the last five financial years, you will be shocked,” Mr Wekube said. “So in essence without NGOs or donor support we just have to look on.”
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative, Elsie Attafuah said in an interview that ensuring sustainability is a collective responsibility for both government and donors.
“There are a couple of ways to look at it; one, climate change projects should filter across the board starting from a strategic/policy point of view to ensure that once they are started there should be mechanisms of seeing them through. Secondly, what capacity/incentives are we providing; India for example has this approach that for each local government that scores highly on a particular intervention they get more money; if it’s planting trees the more you plant and can show for it, the more money you get. Incentives help people to do more,” she said.
Overall, Attafuah explained that climate change conversation needs to be widened—to stop being seen as an issue of the Ministry of Water and Environment—to other sectors like health, transport, migration “because it is about survival at the end of the day.”
“Climate change is an earth shaking thing; the impacts are being seen already .There’s the usually untold impact on health which has seen the rise of Malaria,” she said. “It’s high time we saw the impacts of climate change on other parts of development which we don’t talk about.”
And with Uganda, like most sub-Saharan countries, relying on “nature-based solutions”—from agriculture to tourism—the UNDP boss said, the future could be bleak.
“Different places will require different investments. But then how do we mainstream climate change in the development agenda. The government has done some risk profiling but how do we translate that into action?” she added. “From Karamoja which is linked to the cattle corridor to the Mt Elgon and Rwenzori areas, the vulnerability levels are different and we have to pay attention to what interventions we take where.”
According to James Muhindo, the Resilience and Climate Change Coordinator at Oxfam International (Uganda), what also needs to be done is, “translating the already available science” into local examples for people to fully understand and appreciate the extent of the problem.
“If you ask people in the Mt Elgon areas, they will concur that frequency of the disasters happening in the area has increased. Besides that, how else can they be made to appreciate whatever is happening or that it can no longer be business as usual?” Muhindo averred.
Muhindo acknowledged that Uganda is responding positively through several initiatives, including the National Climate Change Bill 2020 and its implementation needs to be supported after it has been passed by parliament.
While the good news is that government is gradually waking up to reality, the uphill task is where to raise the approximately $160m (Shs. 588 billion) for the different adaptation interventions. Nature however, won’t wait.
