Salome Alweny
23 September 2007
Nairobi — UGANDA needs to promote agro forestry as one of the ways of adapting to climate change - the variation of global and regional climate, over a period of time, an expert has advised.
"Agroforestry, the growing of trees and rearing of animals in the same piece of land has the potential to provide multiple products including fruits good for people's health and a range of environmental services like flood mitigation, cleaning the air off carbon dioxide and formation of rainfall among other benefits," the expert, Dr Louis Verchot, of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, told journalists from Africa undergoing training in reporting on climate change on September19.
The training was organised by the Reuters Foundation and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
"If fast growing nitrogen fixing trees are planted, in this way, we could improve soil fertility by improving soil properties like the capacity of soil to hold water and mitigate floods hence helping farmers buffer agricultural risks," he added.
According to Dr Verchot, human population is growing at an escalating rate hence the need to open up more land to feed the growing population.
However, "cutting down trees will mean more Green House Gasses in the atmosphere.Using the available land through agroforestry is among the least cost option to saving the planet," he advised.
Dr Verchot said despite the efforts of scientific and development organisations, increase in agricultural productivity is still low, as it has been largely through 'extensification' of agriculture and not increasing agricultural productivity.
In Uganda, majority of subsistence farmers in rural areas are already in bad shape with declining land productivity and climate change is going to bring them additional problems.
About 80 percent of the poor people, most of who live in rural areas, depend on agriculture to survive. 'Extreme weather events' are likely to become more intense and more frequent, while higher global temperatures could affect crops, water supplies and spread disease, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
In it's fourth overall assessment report, the scientific body suggests that it is "probably too late" to avoid some impacts in developing countries because about 1 degree centigrade of warming is already in the climate system, The Guardian newspaper, UK, reported on September 18.
"If it is not kept below 2C - which "currently looks very unlikely to be achieved" - up to 3.2 billion people will face water shortages and up to 600 million will face hunger, UNFCC's working Group II, which examines global warming's impact on the environment and people predicted.
The recent flooding in the northern and eastern Uganda may be a foretaste of what awaits the country -- unless we turn to agroforestry.
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