07/11/2021
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni address delegates attending the opening session of the anti-poaching Giants Club Summit meeting in Nanyuki, Laikipia county
The event was attended by representatives of the presidents of Gabon, Uganda, and Rwanda, as well as specialist investors and philanthropists.
President Museveni who did not travel to Glasgow but was represented by Beatrice Anywar Atim, Uganda’s state minister for environment said in his speech that Uganda and Africa need resources to be mobilized to ensure that there is “a soft landing for environmental transgressors.”
“With enough resources, and that is the money we are here to demand for, this is doable,” Museveni said, adding that the world should forget about conserving the environment if the continent continues to conserve underdevelopment.
“Environmental damage is caused by irresponsible, greedy, ignorant and rebellious human beings who don’t respect God’s commands and nature’s tested arrangements,” he said. It is these people who are destroying forests, wetlands and other strategic ecosystems.
Museveni said the climate crisis on the continent can only be averted if African economies get transformed by first ensuring that the young people get an education coupled with rapid industrialisation and electrification. The latter development, Museveni said, would ensure that the continent does away with biomass (firewood) which a great percentage of Africans still depends on for energy.
President Kenyatta noted that despite Africa accounting for 18% of the world’s population, it accounts for less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“Our savannahs, mangroves and swamps, our coral reefs and our marine reserves, are the carbon sinks of the world. They are the basis of the very oxygen that we breathe every day,” Kenyatta said.
“Yet that great public benefit that the African ecosystem provides to the world has not yet been fully acknowledged.
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