Joyce Namugambe
The Archbishop of the church of Uganda His Grace Steven Kazimba Mugalu has led christians and other people together with the development partners such as ACTAlliance and KCCA to engage in cleaning the areas of Nakulabye Kiwunya zone as away of mantaining a clean city.
This comes at a time when African governments and non government stake holders have gathered in Nairobi for the Africa climate week under the theme: cities, urban and rural settlements, infrastructure and transport.
The Archbishop and the team cleaned different areas of Nakulabye as away of encouraging people to keep clean through avoiding disposal of wastes to the environment such as kaveera, as it has been a great contributor to environmental degradation in Uganda, which has a great impact on the climate and threaten natural resources and livelihoods.
Speaking to the people in the area, His Grace Steven Kazimba Mugalu noted that Uganda is facing wide spread environmental degradation most especially desertification, forest degredation, deforestation, encroachment on wetlands, soil erosion, river banks and declining soil fertility which greatly affects the climate.
His Grace expressed concern over the National environmental Act 2019 which informs the performance of the National climate change Act 2021 as being very slow to be implemented which is making it hard for the efforts against waste disposal and management particularly on plastic and polyethene bags.
He added that the country is still challenged with unmanaged garbage collection, littering of all kinds of waste materials all over homes, churches, schools, roads, markets, and public spaces which have led to increase in air pollution, floods, increase in temperature, water pollution among other negative effects.
His Grace expressed concern that if the slow implementation of the laws and policies to govern disposal of wastes and management continues, Uganda’s quest for mitigating the impacts of climate change will remain futile and it will continuously affect human health and livelihoods.
It should be noted that church of Uganda launched a kaveera free environment and tree planting campaigns in 2020 as away of developing policy on environment management and climate change mitigation.
