Uganda must adapt to climate change fast
This week, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning that should countries fail to stick to the demands in the Paris Agreement of keeping global temperatures below 1.5°C in the next 12 years, then the world is doomed.
Climate change is one of the challenges facing our civilisation today and its impact will be felt for generations to come. More worrying is that it is a global problem whose impact is felt by nearly everyone.
Effects of climate change are on our doorstep and can be seen in the form of drought and heavy rains. Its impacts transcend environment, health, food security etc. and that tells you just how urgent this problem is.
Uganda, being an agrarian economy, has in the recent past been hit hard by climate change. The 2015-2016 drought left millions of people without food, not to talk about the threat on our biggest foreign exchange earner, tourism, which largely depends on nature.
Globally, a two-pronged strategy has been mapped to respond to climate change; reducing emissions of and stabilising the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and adapting to climate change.
In Uganda, the National Development Plan talks about how we are adapting to climate change. The strategy includes increasing food security, reducing poverty, increasing levels of education, promoting skills development, and enhancing the integrity of ecosystems. It is good that we have a strategy to adapt to climate change, but we are not moving fast enough.
We need to increase the levels of education among Ugandans. Citizens need to be made more responsible for their actions through improving their scientific knowledge of climate change. And this education should be made non-formal so as to benefit people from all walks of life.
We also need to increase food security. Post-harvest training programmes need to be rolled out to the public to enable citizens store food. Food banks provide an important buffer against famine in the case of unexpected food shortages. Silos such as that of 1,000kgs or 500kgs can help families store grain for an extended period instead of dumping them at giveaway prices for fear of them going bad.
We also need to adapt pro-poor strategies that can inform climate-resilient poverty reduction. Government can be commended for building valley dams, but they also dry up during prolonged dry spells. Government could employ the use of mobile water tanks to make sure these dams always have water to help farmers.
The above, among many more approaches, can ensure Ugandans adapt to climate change. Whereas skeptics might consider the IPCC warning as farfetched, recent research shows that failure to adapt to climate change has been responsible for the fall of civilisations.
