Climate Change and Conflict in Uganda: The Cattle Corridor - FESS ...

Figure 10: Monthly Rainfall Averages in Kakooge, Nakasongola
SOURCE: UGANDA DEPARTMENT OF METEOROLOGY 2010.
Figure 11: Occurrence of Droughts in Uganda
SOURCE: UGANDA DEPARTMENT OF METEOROLOGY 2010.
Kotido, who had arranged the
meeting, posed a question: “So, after
all we have talked about, all of the
problems and difficulties that we face,
what can we do about them, what
can we do to make things better?”
No one had an answer.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND
THE DATA DILEMMA
In much of what has been written
about climate change in Uganda, the
factual basis for climate change is
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either implicitly accepted or
accounted for by reference to the
IPCC’s fairly broad climate model
projections for East Africa. 18 Rainfall
in most of Uganda is bimodal, with
the so-called long rains from March
through May and short rains in the
September to December time frame
(ACCRA 2010). Uganda is regularly
affected by El Niño (wetter) and La
Niña (drier) cycles. In general, climate
models project more frequent, heavy
rainfall in the latter part of the year,
as was the case in 2007 when the
country was hit by disastrous flooding
(Oxfam 2008). Karamoja differs in
that it has a unimodal pattern, with
most rain distributed somewhat
erratically between April and
September, and peak rainfall in July/
August (ACCRA 2010).
However, if climate change is
occurring in Uganda, it is imperfectly
captured by the available empirical
data. 19 As officials from the
Department of Meteorology readily
acknowledge, a lack of weather
stations and time-series data (in some