Former UNICEF UK Youth Climate Ambassador Luke Hughes, who is in Durban for the UN climate summit with the UK Youth Climate Coalition, on what he learned about climate change in Uganda while volunteering there over the summer.
Ten days ago I arrived in Durban, South Africa for the UN Climate Negotiations, as one of 11 young people on the UK Youth Delegation. I’m here to raise the voice of young people on the international stage, and to let people back in the UK know about what’s going on inside.
This is actually the second time I’ve been in Africa this year. In the summer, I spent some time in East Africa, doing a bit of volunteering with my uni and travelling around (you can read more about this on my blog for the UK Youth Climate Coalition). The bulk of my time was spent in Uganda, and, working with local communities, I realised that their concept of climate change is very different to ours. To us, it’s a matter of the science and politics of tomorrow. To them, it’s the rains and the droughts of today. Changing weather patterns have made the Ugandan rainy season completely unpredictable. When the rains come late, families go hungry… hunger of a kind that we’re personally unfamiliar with, hunger that leads to death and disease. Moreover, they have their own environmental problems in their local areas - Uganda has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, which means that women and children have to walk ever further in search of firewood, on top of their daily commute to the water source.
There are cheap and easy solutions to such problems - simple mud stoves can be built for free, they reduce firewood usage, cook faster, are safer and smokeless. This is a fantastic example of how a fight for local sustainability is a fight for a better quality of life, just as the fight against global climate change is a fight for a brighter future.Anyway, UNICEF Uganda, in its work to protect children’s rights throughout the country, is on the front line of coping with the effects of climate change. While I was visiting, I was unnervingly close to a famine of biblical proportions, stretching all the way down from the Horn of Africa to the north of Uganda.Karamoja, a Northern sub-region with the highest poverty rate in Uganda, is a place with which UNICEF is familiar. It was already working with children there, but with the onset of such drought, this sort of place turns critical. It’s not a question of adaptation, but survival.
Meanwhile, UNICEF is finding links between quality of life and pollution elsewhere too. For instance, their Technology for Development group is looking at reinventing the toilet. As the head of UNICEF Uganda put it to me: ‘Why not put a price on poo?!’ At first I thought he was crazy, but it makes sense. If the typical Ugandan long-drop latrine could be suitably redesigned, the human waste collected can be used as fertiliser and the gas given off used as cooking fuel. Other organic waste (such as cow dung) can be put to good use too, and they're piloting such a project in Karamoja.The most vulnerable are the most at risk from climate change, and the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable are the young. However, this is a fairly recent idea, and like most organisations around the world, UNICEF is still getting to grips with how a changing climate will affect its work. As a young person given the opportunity to engage with the UN climate process, I’m going to make sure the negotiators remember that children are suffering today, and that my generation is inheriting a damaged world.
Look out for more updates from inside the negotiations over the next week or so!
Me meeting the Head of UNICEF Uganda in Kampala