ENGAGING RURAL YOUTH ON CLIMATE CHANGE:
If nothing is done now, 50 years from today my grandchild, 16 years old then will be in his S.4 geography tour in case the curriculum doesn’t change, will write to me, “a lone tree stands in an expanse of a brown landscape in Mombokolo Desert, Uganda. Mombokolo is in Uganda’s wettest central. According to the 2047 tree census, there is about a single tree for every three square kilometers in Mombokolo and there is no evidence of another life around the tree. The youth convene under this tree for shade and to smoke the cigar and never thinking about planting more for more shades. Who did this? Is this the tree of the forbidden fruit?” I will write back to my grandchild simply but painfully, “dear grandson Robin Woods, neither is the tree forbidden nor is its fruit. The lumbers went to get more oil for their harvester machine to fell it. It may survive if the smokers put up a fight to defend their shade. Let me hope you still have the drinking water we collected from the morning dew on the backyard yam leaf. Return the water because we need to water the yam before it dries.”
 |
| Author; Kansiime Onesmus 2021 |
A country whose green and forest mountainous pearliness is being mutated into pearls of dust, naked rocks and brown hills, where many still regard climate change as a hoax and/or think it is not in their power to put an end to it but have all weaponry to exacerbate it. According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Uganda lost 1.86% of its forest cover annually between 1990 and 2010. According to the Global Forest Watch, Uganda lost 73.6kha of tree cover in 2020 equivalent to 36.0Mt of CO2 of emissions. A big proportion of this ecological loss is in rural areas. Nonetheless, climate change is largely a topic that has been “hidden” from ordinary citizens whose lives depend on unsustainable agricultural practices that contribute to climate change, food insecurity and water scarcity, destroy ecosystems and living environments. Uganda is a resource based economy, many people make a living from agriculture, “deforestation”, harvesting natural resources, and destroying habitats for wildlife which are most often located in rural areas. Climate change is still that fancy topic whose sad statistics is great for speeches by upper capital city blue collar workers. We need not only talk about climate change between boardroom walls, in well written funding concepts and spaces where talking about climate change makes us more acceptable and look smarter. We need to make slum dwellers and “villagers” aware about its dangers and combat it before we reach the verge of a planetary catastrophe whose winds will first blow the well written unimplemented climate action policies out of those boardroom shelves.
According to the World Bank collection of development indicators, Uganda’s rural population stands at 75.05% of the overall population and the percentage of urban population living in slums stands at 48.3%. These big proportions despite being chief perpetrators of climate change no little or nothing about the danger they are causing.
A village is a critical place to combatting climate change; given that there is a bigger proportion of people in rural areas unaware of the dangers of climate change than the proportion of urbanites; there are higher poverty levels in rural areas than there are in town and we cannot pretend to be ignorant about the effects of poverty on climate change; there is a bigger proportion of rural populations that depend on agriculture than urban populations which if not well and sustainably practiced, destroys the ecosystem. Looking at the point of ecological restoration and preservation, there are more chances of preserving the present and restoring the lost green cover in rural areas with lower populations and better adherence to the law than in urban areas where perpetrators easily bribe their way out or are part of the system that sculpts and later breaks its laws. Oh impunity is a privilege! Our climate policy is well scented but we need to breathe more life from it through proper climate action than well written policies that are action-starved.
Should we be hopeful? Yes. In these rural areas lie able young people. In fact youth, in addition to comprising the biggest proportion of national and urban population, they also comprise the biggest proportion of rural population, 80% of Uganda’s youth live in rural areas, and are socially and environmentally aware about climatic recovery, protection and preservation. Involving them will bring intergenerational policy input into climatic reconstruction.
To tackle climate change, we need both concerted effort and personal interest. However, rural youth are not well organized and each individual youth feels powerless in their personal interest to cause change. We need to take action. Rather than Government and development partners such as the United Nations Joint Framework Initiative on Children, Youth and Climate Change (Joint
Framework Initiative) waiting for youth to start youth-led and youth-focused organisations and then jump in, they need to organize unorganized youth into rural youth-led initiatives. Many youth organizations in rural areas are little or not concerned about climate change. Most of these are formed to tap into Government poverty alleviation programs many of which have not been effective and have nothing or little to do with climate action directly or indirectly. We can still form youth-led initiatives on climate change, add a climate action component in youth development initiatives, and still teach them climate smart poverty alleviation programs to young people.
There are many initiatives to bring elite youth to the tables of decision making such as the UNFCCC conferences but we need to help young people own the actions of the policies they propose or else these conferences will remain mere networking opportunities and photo moments. That doing activism like I am doing in this article, I should set out and plant a tree after writing the final word. To tackle climate change is not about how afraid to reclaim a swamp or how articulate I am about climate reform and ecological restoration but how concerned I am to plant a tree on a brown hill and turn it green. Climate change is a simple topic; we have sophisticated it that many people are mistaken that it needs only experts to address it who may have nothing or little to do with the activities that perpetuate it.
We need to equip rural youth as individuals and in their groups with resilience, a sense of concern on the realities of climate change, and to own the new climate change regime not just as followers of the law nor as people pleasers but as people who understand the effects of climate change on themselves and the generation of their grandchildren, and act expecting nothing in return but for the benefit of the now and the future.
By Kansiime Onesmus, Rural Youth, start with me.
Comments
Post a Comment