Our environment and climate needs a saviour

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OPINION

By Christabel Ruganzu

Corruption is a deliberate act that includes but not limited to seeking or giving bribes, theft and illegal use of resources placed in one’s trust.

Corruption is faced by all sectors which include environment and climate change, health, education and transport and works.

My essay focuses on the environment and climate change and their effects on other sectors.

Environment refers to man and his surroundings and environmental degradation is when these surroundings are destroyed.

According to the internet, climate change is the long term increase in the earth’s average surface temperature and large scale changes in weather patterns, caused by a significant increase in the level of greenhouse gases causing the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is when greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide prevent heat from escaping into space hence causing global warming since the ozone layer is destroyed hence change in the climate.

Environmental degradation is caused by practices like; Swamp drainage. Swamps are areas where rain water usually collects when it rains heavily. Unfortunately, most swamps are drained for construction and farming, hence causing floods since the water has nowhere to go. People get licenses to carry out these activities through bribery which is one of the commonest forms of corruption.

Sometimes the floods end up causing destruction of property and roads which causes a negative impact on the transport sector. When money is allocated to fix the destroyed roads, the workmanship is poor leading to a short lifespan of the fixed roads.

In the transport sector, roads are destroyed due to the floods hence making it hard for people to travel. This affects adults going to work as well as students/pupils going to school.

In the education sector, schools are washed away by floods, for example, in Ntoroko district, many schools have been washed away or damaged by floods hence affecting the education of the students.

Another way in which our environment is destroyed is when ignorant and selfish Ugandans throw rubbish in drainage channels hence making them clogged and accumulate dirty and stagnant water. This affects the health sector in a way that people catch different waterborne diseases such as typhoid and when they go to hospitals, they barely find any medicine or workers partly due to corruption.

On the other hand, Climate change is caused by air pollution which  is the introduction of harmful fumes in the air.

According to the Sunday Monitor newspaper of 7^th January,2024, the sources of air pollution include; fuels used for cooking, transportation and power generation. These fuels emit carbon dioxide gases into the atmosphere, hence causing global warming.  The newspaper also states that Africa is responsible for about 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions causing climate change. It also states that in 2019, air pollution caused 1.1 million premature deaths in Africa. Most of these deaths are caused by cooking with wood and charcoal.

Based on the above examples, the effects of climate change and environmental degradation affect other sectors like transport, health and education; all of which are heavily affected by lack of transparency and accountability leading to high corruption levels.

I call upon the young people of Uganda to protect the environment by at least each planting a tree every school holiday and join the environment and climate clubs in their schools and communities to learn more about protecting the environment, managing climate change and observing transparency and accountability in such engagements.

Together we can save our environment and control climate change.

The writer is a Senior Two female student from Mt. St. Mary’s College Namagunga