Action Agenda
Biodiversity
Uganda’s most important strategic asset – whether for competing in global markets or sustaining rural communities – is its rich biodiversity of plant and animal species, geological features, water bodies, and climatic zones. Unfortunately, government and private interests see areas of biodiversity as fallow and unproductive, good only for “economic development” projects whose full costs exceed their benefits. NAPE’s action agenda for biodiversity consists of campaigns to protect and regenerate vital areas.
Biodiversity can take as many forms as there are ecological areas. One form can be in an unspoiled lake, with plants, waterfowl and fish species interacting in patterns established centuries earlier. Another can be in a damp rainforest that absorbs huge quantities of rainfall, processing it back into lush green, varied plant life, diverse animal species, sending water back to the skies through evaporation and plant transpiration, and providing people with a variety of foods and products. The biodiversity of semi-arid grasslands can be diverse in more subtle ways, but productive nonetheless.
Uganda’s rich biodiversity supports a tourism industry that is our second largest source of foreign exchange, and one of the most important tourist industries in Africa. It provides a sustainable livelihood to communities in and around those areas. More important, it preserves for future generations a biodiversity envied by other nations and constitutes our patrimony to future generations of Ugandans.
Importance of Biodiversity
What these and other ecological areas have in common is a well-established balance of biodiversity that provides resilience, sustainability, and productivity. Disrupting that balance by human intervention results in unintended, sometimes disastrous, consequences that can include new heat stresses, water shortages, soil erosion and flooding, depletion of wild foods and medicinal plants, and degraded air and water quality, to name a few.
This deprives affected communities of their traditional livelihoods and forces them either to move away or try to subsist with fewer resources than they had before. They lose their independence and control over their way of life. Their lives have become unsustainable, and Uganda loses economically and environmentally.
Informal habits and norms protected Uganda’s biodiversity for centuries until colonial rulers imposed their own regulations that too often allowed encroachment in natural areas that upset the natural balance. But those same rulers also began to enact legal protections of many areas designated worth saving.
Protected Areas
Today, over a quarter of Uganda’s land area (15.9 million acres out of 59.6 million total) is a protected area – national parks, forests and game preserves. The economic and cultural worth of this rich store of protected lands is incalculable and gains value every year.
Yet these protected lands are also under constant threat of encroachment and serious damage by shortsighted economic development projects – with more to come.
Seemingly every year new projects surface that would permit minerals mining in even our most cherished parks, such as limestone mining in Queen Elizabeth National Park, oil development and refining in the Kabwoya Wildlife Preserve, clear cutting for a sugarcane plantation in the Mabira Central Forest Reserve, destroying much of the Bugala Island Central Forest Reserve in Lake Victoria’s Kalangala district for a palm oil plantation, flooding of the heritage Bujagali Falls by a downstream hydroelectric dam on the Victoria Nile, and even a proposed golf course and swimming pool in Murchison Falls National Park.
Sustaining Biodiversity in Uganda
While protecting the biodiversity of the quarter of our land area ostensibly under legal protection, sustaining the biodiversity of the remaining three-quarters is just as important. Much of this three-quarters is privately owned, and the loss of biodiversity on these lands can have even greater impacts. Preventing this is the role of government requiring development and environmental standards that minimize loss of biodiversity – and adoption by businesses and communities of best practices.
For all the obvious necessity to protect biodiversity, we suffer from a government mindset that these lands have little economic value and should remain protected only until someone proposes using it for “economic development.” This triggers a “degazetting” – that is, repeal of official protections – instead of preserving their priceless natural and economic value.
This is doubly frustrating, given that our government signed in 2002 the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a legally binding international agreement obligating Uganda to implement forestry programs using standards of sustainable use and management of biological diversity. Instead, as a 2008 monitoring report (by NAPE) found, there was little awareness of CBD biodiversity standards, limited funding, and replanting programs that ignored biodiversity techniques. The report found few assurances that Uganda would meet 2015 goals.
NAPE Actions
Responding to this urgent need, NAPE has the following action agenda:
Through many of our activities, we press for government to follow the laws that established protected lands and to seek reasonable modifications only after administrative and legislative proceedings openly conducted with the participation of all affected parties.
We also press government to enact and follow development and environmental standards, including international treaties and conventions, that can protect biodiversity. We must take seriously the UN’s Millennium Development Goals that seek to solve poverty through sustainable development.
Community Ecological Government is a NAPE strategy that can harness the power of indigenous knowledge that has sustained culturally government natural resources throughout much of Uganda. Using that strategy, NAPE has recommended best practices in several cultural forests in the Buganda kingdom.
The Global Forest Coalition in 2007 selected NAPE as independent country monitor for compliance with the Convention on Biological Diversity’s standards for sustainable use and biological diversity of Uganda’s forests. The monitoring report in 2008 disclosed little government progress, or even awareness, to meeting 2015 goals.
To help rural Ugandans assert their rights to live and work in biodiverse areas, NAPE created the Sustainability School to educate and mobilize them. The Sustainability School is a “school without walls” to train communities to protect their rights and enhance their quality of life, resilience and prosperity.
With help from international funders, NAPE carried out research, organized workshops and created advocacy materials about the dangers of agrofuels plantations that destroy biodiversity natural areas (included protected areas), violate tenure rights, and harm food security.
Our gender mainstreaming campaign does not just seek an equal voice for women, it aims to harness the knowledge, energies and talents of especially rural women to protect the biodiversity of their natural areas. Usually responsible for gathering fuel, food and water for their families, women have a direct stake and can be powerful protectors of our biodiversity.
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