Protect environment before it’s too late
What you need to know:
- The issue: Climate change.
- Our view: Our plea is for us all to do our part in ensuring that we don’t experience these hotter temperatures. The word climate change has been thrown around a lot yet its gravity seems to be lost on us.
Scientists have warned that Uganda is going to have much hotter temperatures in the future. One researcher predicts that our temperatures will increase by 2.5 to 3.5 degrees by 2050. If one can recall how hot it was just recently, then any increase in temperatures is not something you would want to ignore. Apart from the discomfort of hot temperatures to the body, high temperatures have far-reaching effects to the country’s economy when they affect our food output.
They also affect our physical features in terms of water sources drying up, not to mention how difficult it becomes to work under the open sky during this time. In short, this prediction is not one of those ‘scientists say’ studies that we can easily scroll over or ignore. It is an opportunity to do something about it instead of whining about the heat when it comes around.
One of the reasons cited for the increase in temperatures is the fact that “we have destroyed our carbon sinks”. These sinks include forests and wetlands. The fact that we have and continue to destroy our wetlands and forests has been covered in this newspaper, other mainstream media, in classrooms and even in casual conversation, almost ad nauseam.
Yet washing bays and more permanent structures keep cropping up in wetlands and forests, not in the cover of night, because that would show some form of remorse, but in broad daylight.
Where responsible authorities have tried to intervene, this effort has been rendered useless years later. For instance, Kampala Capital City Authority destroyed structures in the swamp between Kansanga and Bunga on Gaba Road a few years ago. We covered the story and applauded the authority. Today, there are more structures than what was demolished at the time to the point that it would be hard to convince a six-year-old that the swamp was so vibrant that a fresh breeze hit you immediately you approached the area, once upon a time.
That is where we are headed if we do not take advantage of this information about hotter temperatures to reverse things; we will be telling future generations about the wonderful weather we once enjoyed while we unsuccessfully fan our faces of the heat.
Our plea, therefore, is for us all to do our part in ensuring that we don’t experience these hotter temperatures. The word climate change has been thrown around a lot yet its gravity seems to be lost on us. Authorities whose mandate is to protect the environment need to step up but more than that, we need to hold them accountable. This will only happen if we put aside our selfish interests to realise that we are only hurting ourselves when we destroy the environment.
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