Uganda: Kampala Should Learn Wetlands Conservation From Kigali

Does the pearl of Africa have some environmental lessons to pick from the land of a thousand hills? I answer in the affirmative.

One can write the entire world about Rwanda and Uganda but my recent visit to Kigali awed me with how successfully they have conserved their wetlands, and protected them from encroachers and pollution, especially plastic pollution.

I recently asked a friend in Kigali how the city was able to keep visibly clean and ward off big and small encroachers like those suffocating Kampala's wetlands with factories, dwellings and plastic waste.

Another friend in Kigali told me that it does not matter who you are in Kigali and how powerful you perceive yourself, if you pollute or encroach on a wetland or forest, you suffer dire consequences. To a Kampalan, this uniform application of environmental law, an ingredient of environmental rule of law and good environmental governance that I cherish as a citizen and as required by the Treaty for the establishment of the East African Community (EAC), is the stuff of dreams.

If you are financially strong, politically connected or militarily high in Kampala, you can erect a fuel station in a forest or build a sweets manufacturing factory in a wetland and prosper with impunity. While one city forbids and punishes impunity, the other ignores and rewards it. Resultantly, the environmental and climatic implications are different in each country by a mile.

My audience confirmed to me that compliance with conservation rules and other laws is not only ubiquitous but also that once government promulgates a law, obedience to the same soon crystalizes into a culture.

This culture of uniform and efficient rule of law in Kigali - which is the opposite of a culture of reticence to rules in Kampala by both the led and the leaders has yielded two different fruits. The beautiful, replenished wetlands with rich blankets of forest cover characterize Kigali while Kampala is choked by the ugliness of deforested lands and polluted wetlands suffocated by plastics and concrete.

Kampala can learn a lot from Kigali on how to manage our wetlands, and forests and how to keep plastics away from our homes, streets and shops. Rwanda's ban on kaveera (plastic bags) is such a success - boasts of a generation of young people growing up without knowledge of what a plastic bag is. Imagine!

Fighting plastic pollution is key because human beings everywhere are entitled, as a human right, to a clean, sustainable and healthy environment. This is in keeping with not only the inherent dignity of humans but also in light of the recent UN General Assembly resolution on the right to a healthy and sustainable environment.

The same can be said about the environmental and ecological significance of keeping our forests and wetlands blossoming. Fighting pollution, as well as conservation of wetlands and forests in Kampala and Kigali, is essential for both capitals to battle the three planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

Flourishing forests and wetlands are nature-based solutions to the climate emergency. The world has less than 10 years to thwart or suffer unprecedented and irreversible loss and damage associated with climate change. Forests and wetlands are biodiversity hotspots that help cities and communities by supplying them with medicine, food, rain, climate modification, recreation, tourism revenues, besides being heritage and indigenous knowledge repositories. They are key to human reproduction, health, revenue, culture and are closely linked with the well-being of humans and are essential for human identity.

It is crucial that Kampala and Kigali use their forests, wetlands and other nature-based approaches to comply with their commitments under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC) and Paris Agreement on climate change whose ultimate aim, is to keep global temperature well below 2 degrees celsius and ideally below 1.5 degrees celsius compared to pre-industrial levels of 1800 degrees celsius so as to be able to avoid or adopt (be resilient to) the adverse effects of climate change.

These adverse effects such as extreme weather conditions including flash floods, food insecurity, or prolonged droughts and such loss and damage as human death, destruction of homes by mudslides and crop or animal destruction. Forests and wetlands are carbon sinks since they draw from the atmosphere and store tons of carbon - the primary heat-trapping gas that is the primary climate change causing greenhouse gas.

Beyond the forests and wetlands of the biosphere, Kigali has a green initiative called a car-free day which is observed monthly. Only pedestrians and riders populate the city on such days. Kampala has none and could do with one.

The author is the CEO of The Environment Shield Uganda.

Uganda: Kampala Should Learn Wetlands Conservation From Kigali

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