Adopt new approach on climate change
Patrick Kajuma Kagaba
What you need to know:
- On the agricultural arena that takes up to 80 percent of the population, the food systems would likely be gravely affected as up to 50 to 70 percent on average of the annual crop yields would dwindle with nearly no other agricultural adaptation methods but rather explode the vulnerability levels.
Uganda is at crossroads with eminent issues of climate change that pause diverse yet severe health and economic risks to human life.
The human induced climate change effects signal a reduction in lakes and river levels, changes in precipitation and generally continuous amounts of extreme heat on the earth surface than never before.
At the eventual arrival of these effects, there is going to be debilitating effects on the country’s health and economic assets. To date, Uganda may not have fully taken a comprehensive assessment of the health and economic risks that result from the changing climate yet there needs to be a standard risk-assessment approach to determine the magnitude of all potential consequences the country would encounter in order to remain on the right trajectory.
And indeed, as a country, we should choose a better path as quickly as possible by acting very responsibly and aggressively at both adaptation to the changing climate and mitigation of the future impacts by reducing carbon emissions so that we effectively work towards reducing individual exposure to the eminent and worst health plus economic risks of climate change.
The current leadership under President Yoweri Museveni should demonstrate or exhibit very robust and prudent national leadership on climate as it has in the past done on several human facing fronts to environmentally and sustainably protect the future generation.
If we don’t change as fast by taming the current activities on land, water and in atmosphere, we may be headed for a ‘production slowdown’ in the coming years because according to my findings, labour productivity of workers in this country, like those working in construction, mining and extraction, utility maintenance, transport, landscaping, and agriculture could be reduced by as much as 30 to 50 percent by the turn of the century.
The situation of climate change is so dire that if we take it lightly, over the longer term, we could see extremely reverberating heat portions surpassing the 1.5°C threshold at which the human body could no longer maintain a normal body temperature without air conditioning.
Thus, everyone whose job is external without any air conditioning, would experience severe health risks and potentially die. This would be due to increase on earth’s surface temperature causing a runaway greenhouse effect, creating conditions more extreme than present-day Venus and heating earth’s surface enough to melt it hence extinction of most life on earth.
In such a convoluted scenario, the demand for electricity to run the air conditioning systems would surge in most dry areas of the country experiencing extreme temperature increases, yet Uganda stills struggles with issues of accessibility, generation and transmission capacities, which would further exacerbate the consumption costs to end users.
On the agricultural arena that takes up to 80 percent of the population, the food systems would likely be gravely affected as up to 50 to 70 percent on average of the annual crop yields would dwindle with nearly no other agricultural adaptation methods but rather explode the vulnerability levels.
This potentially emerging “ugly” situation calls on the National Resistance Movement government, policy-makers, business community and the general public to rise up to the challenge by leading the way to help avert these foreseeable climate change risks.
Our singular hope lies in the government to facilitate actions aimed at collecting and disseminating crucial information and data about how climate change affects key sectors and regions of national economy for early preparation. This first step, if taken seriously, would prepare our motherland to a new and forgivable development path whose health and economic future are well secured and more certain.
Finally, it may not be too late to avert climate change effects but I urge government to consider implementing the insurance policy contained in the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty against substances that deplete the Ozone layer, which only stands on paper till this day.
Mr Kajuma is an MPA Scholar, Uganda Management Institute.
