Ebenezer T. Bifubyeka (Ten),Biafra, Mbarara, Western UIganda.
ESCALATING high temperature is invading bedrooms, hindering couples from hugging each other at night!
When the chairman for Network of Climate Journalists in the Greater Horn of Africa (NECJOGHA), Patrick Luganda told climate journalists at Muyenga Club last week that some couples have opted for separate beds over Climate Change, people laughed it off!
Luganda had said: during the night, the husband first pushes the blanket away; then stops hugging his partner. Next, he pushes her away or relocates to another bed!
However, one of the eight pilot Climate Change Mid Career Journalists argued that the prevailing hotness at night is not a new phenomenon, for temperature levels always fluctuate. True; but the duration of change in temperature has been expedited by environmental degradation from ‘millions of years and tens of decades to a mere decade!’
Scientists define Climate Change as any ‘long-term’ significant change in the expected patterns of average weather of a specific region. But now we experience a ‘short-term’ significant change – not long term as before!
Swamp reclamation and deforestation in Kabale district in western Uganda resulted to the rise in temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius, displacing the area’s famous coldness – in less than two decades!
That slight temperature rise made Kabale conducive for female anopheles mosquitoes, which introduced malaria in Kabale for the first time in history, making it the most vulnerable spot for malaria in Uganda!
The perilous Climate Change continues to capitalise on our ignorance: most of us under-look conservation because we don’t understand that, ‘environment’ is everything; it contains everything, drives everything and people are an integral part of the environment. Any harm on surroundings has an impact – a ‘short time’ – on lives!
We think we are apart and environment is separate – yet we are inside the environment. People and environment are like a cobweb! And Climate Change is the heart of the general environment since it holds the steering wheel of life: land or aquatic.
A slight increase in temperature leads to more and destructive floods, diseases, drought, water scarcity, famine, poverty and deaths!
Besides the melting 40% of the ice caps on Mountain Rwenzori, the rising temperature has hit Karamoja, increasing droughts in the area from usual one drought in 10 years to seven between 1991 and 2000 – all in the name of massive degradation!
Food and Agriculture Organisation’s representative in Uganda, Percy Misika in September 2008 warned that if the current climate change is not mitigated, global warming will rise to between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius in less than 100 years, killing millions of species!
Fortunately, members of Rwampara Agro-forestry Limited: Lt. Gen. Ivan Koreta, Hon. Charles Ngabirano, Eng. John Tumwesigye, Steven Bebuuze and Robert Takwesire – have planted 200,000 pines and 40,000 eucalyptus trees (worth sh72m) on five hills in Nyabikungu, Rwampara in Mbarara.
Rwampara Agro-forestry Limited has also established a one-hectare nursery bed with 1,000,000 pine seedlings, 500,000 coffee seedlings and all types of grafted fruit trees at Makenke near Mbarara Coca-Cola plant – besides giving out 44,000 tree seedlings of pine, calbia and acapar to the neighbouring farmers.
However, since forest reserves on private land are being degraded six times faster than those on public land (according to the commissioner for forest sector support, Rachael Musoke), planting trees on five hills – is still a drop in the ocean!
More drops are needed to make an ocean. Forests are our ocean. Our drops are trees. It needs concerted effort to replenish the bald heads of bare hills and avert the faster and abnormal change of climate. And the onus is on nobody else rather than you and I.
Ends.
Word count: 600.
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