Lifestyle melts away with Uganda peak snow cap
By Ben Simon
BUNDIBUGYO, Uganda (AFP) — In 1906, Mount Speke, one the highest peaks of Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains was covered with 217 hectares (536 acres) of ice, according to the Climate Change Unit at Uganda?s ministry of water and environment. In 2006, only 18.5 hectares remained. Satellite images taken in 1987 and again in 2005 show that much of the thaw has occurred over the past two decades. When Yasamu Maate was a younger man, he could stand in his garden on a clear, cloudless morning and stare at the ice caps on the range. But on a recent Friday the 87-year-old lamented the loss of those ice caps, which have all but disappeared, as the world around him has gotten warmer. “We used to use the snow and ice as our guide,” he said, sitting on a roadside chair in Bundibugyo, a village in western Uganda at the base of the Rwenzoris, which run roughly 100 kilometres (60 miles) along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We would say if there was a lot of snow on the mountains the rain was coming, but these days we are not seeing it. The coldness has disappeared.” “The ice is literally disappearing. In some cases it has disappeared, and I am more than certain that this is a result of global warming,” said Philip Gagwe, who heads the Climate Change Unit. “Man-made global warming is here. We are smelling it and we are touching it.” … Goretti Kitutu, a climate change specialist at NEMA, said people might soon be competing for water as well. The snow cap provides a steady trickle of water to the neighbouring communities and feeds the Nile river basin, which includes Lake George and Lake Albert. “Once this ice disappears we shall have serious problems in the hydrology of the area. We will see reduced water in the lakes and that will impact the Nile basin,” Kitutu explained. …
