Museveni addresses UN on climate change

Sep 24, 2014

PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni has said climate change is a new modern aggression against the always wronged African continent and people

By Vision Reporter

 

PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni has said climate change is a new modern aggression against the always wronged African continent and people, and warned that such life threatening aggression against humanity should stop.

 

“The global threat by the North American, European and some of the Asian countries is through the release of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere as well as the release of other gases that erode the ozone layer.

 

This is the global threat which is so much talked about and for which a solution must be found,” he said.

 

President Museveni was on Tuesday addressing the 69th United Nations General Assembly during the Climate Change Summit currently going on in New York.

 

The President added that another regional threat to the environment that could exacerbate the problem is the damage by under-developed countries such as Uganda and caused by two deficiencies including the lack of electricity that leads to populations destroying the biomass in search of fuel for cooking and the lack of industrialization that causes overcrowding of the people into subsistence and primitive agriculture.

 

“This overcrowding into agriculture compels people to invade forests and wetlands in search of new agricultural lands having misused long cultivated portions of the land. The threat to the forests is absorbing 60,000 tons of carbon-dioxide per annum and the threat to the wetlands will interfere with the transpiration of moisture into the atmosphere that will in turn interfere with rain formation,” he said giving examples of West Nile and Karamoja in Uganda which are on the same latitude with the former getting 55.1 inches of rain while the latter gets 31.5 inches of rain per annum.

 

Museveni said the electrification of the tropical parts of Africa and the industrialization is part of the environmental protection which is a factor in mitigating climate change.

 

He proposed that a fund to reclaim the forests and wetlands where they have been encroached on and also to reward those who are still protecting them be put in place as motivation.

 

“I have always been infuriated by the shrunk ice caps on the Rwenzori Mountains and the Kilimanjaro. The Rwenzori range of mountains has about 27 high peaks that are above the altitude of 15,000 ft above sea-level. By 1906, nine of them had ice-caps on top, today only three have got some ice on top,” he said.

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