AfrII Chairman, Prof. George William Otim-Nape addresses climate change experts during the CBIT Project workshop at Hotel Africana.
“We are doing something but not enough. Uganda is losing close to 200,000 hectares of forest every year. This situation is thus quite worrying because it exposes a high rate of deforestation in the country. Years from now we shall have no forests, no rain, no water. Hence, this country needs high level committed leadership in environmental conservation to fight climate change. It needs innovative interventions and really serious and committed leadership where everybody is mobilized to own the fight against climate change. Imagine if there was a law saying “each person living in Uganda must plant a tree on his or her birthday. Or if it said, ‘On every wedding anniversary, plant a tree. How many trees would be planted in a day?” And, if we do this consistently for 10 years, we will have contributed a great deal to climate action.” –AfrII Chairman, Professor George William Otim-Nape.
He urged everybody to get on board and actively join the fight against climate change. “Let us all have the will and commitment to this. The threats are real, we are experiencing them, and being hit hard, an evident example is the long dry spells the country is currently faced with, the floods and landslides. Therefore, if we do not conserve nature, we will continue to suffer such climate change effects” added Prof. Nape.
He made the remarks at the just concluded National Stakeholders Workshop for the National Green House Gas Inventory (GHG) and Measuring Reporting and Verification (MRV) system under the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) Project. The event was organized by the Ministry of Water and Environment-Climate Change Department (MoWE-CCD) in collaboration with Conservation International (CI) and the Africa Innovations Institute (AfrII) with aim to;
- Conduct gender awareness and mainstreaming in sector specific climate change activities.
- Share lessons and best practices across sectors in climate action.
- Assess the training, capacity and data management needs in the 5 NDC sectors.
- Revitalize the discussion around the institutional arrangements on data collection, processing and sharing. Role
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) through CI is funding the CBIT Project to support GOU to meet the transparency requirements of the Paris Agreement. CBIT intends to support CCD to strengthen institutional arrangements and build capacity of stakeholders for GHG data collection and processing in 5 key sectors; Agriculture, Forestry, Energy, Transport and Waste.
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