Barely 20 kilometers away from Gulu City to the famous Fort Patiko where thousands of homeless people fled the war, Lukodi Primary School served as a haven and continues to display the scenes of the conflict as it sits on a 14-acre piece of land next to the monument honouring those who were killed.
Mohamad Olanya was taken to the camp for safety nearly twenty years ago at the age of nine. He and the other eighteen members of his family were kept in a school surrounded by the beauty of nature but woke up one evening, his loved ones had gone and the school was barren of its beauty.
The question of how human lives and their surroundings were undignified by the war still goes on unresolved but if climate change is the war for the planet, then the trees could have provided the essential army needed to hold onto the future, all are systematically gone at the time.
While the trees too never lived, a 2021 Journal Article co-authored by Forest Products Laboratory demonstrates the significance of trees in reducing the effects of climate change, since each tree may absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In this instance, sustainable forest management will be most effective in reducing the effects of climate change because of its special ability to store carbon emissions and purify the air.
Olanya who currently serves on the school management committee also looks after a monument that was built in memory of the May 19, 2004 massacre which claimed the lives of fifteen of his loved ones.
“Our huts surrounded the barracks from the outside. The rebels attacked us and proceeded to the barracks,” Olanya remembers. “They killed two men, five women, and eight children from our family.”
“My people are those names in the monument up to the middle. He says, “Those kids knew we would play together here in the forest around this school even though we can’t see each other today.
Olanya still vividly remembers that the school had many trees the year before the conflict, and he and his siblings used to go there to play games of hunting, pursuing rats and killing them for extra food.
The once dense woodland playground is now devoid of trees and the stems that once supported thousands of people at the protected camp have not grown back.
At the height of the insurgency, the National Army used several northern Ugandan schools as makeshift camps for internally displaced persons while keeping an eye out for Lord’s Resistance Army militants.
On the fateful night of May 19, the school lost property valued at over 100 million shillings, the deputy headteacher Vincent Oyet disclosed in a recent interview.
Arsons, bombs, and close-range gunfire were used with precision to target defenceless people. The school and its belongings were destroyed, the camp was dissolved and lives were lost.
About 4,000 displaced persons called Lukodi primary school homes and were in over 700 households and relied mostly on wood fuels for cooking, with posho and beans being supplied as relief.
When the government issued a decree on school feeding programs through the Ministry of Education and Sports, the trees had already disappeared. Every school supplies its students as instructed.
Literally, Lukodi had to search far-off territories for trees to prepare meals because the concentrated camp had already cleared the surrounding communities spanning about five square kilometers.
The cost of feeding students amidst the energy crisis
At its inception in 2013, Lukodi would spend 1.5 million shillings on firewood. Each term, the school needed 8 trips of dry wood, and the annual cost of wood fuels stood at 4.5 million.
Despite the Ministry of Education’s merger allocation of capitation grants to primary schools, Oyet pointed out that during a 12-year period, the Lukodi spent more than 40 million on firewood purchases.
The original three-stone cooking stove was expensive, but it would also take longer to prepare meals because cooks occasionally had to leave the kitchen because of uncontrollably high fumes.
Oyet noted that “you could see the high cost of feeding but the health of those in the kitchen were worrying though we had not registered any complications from them.”
Offsetting carbon emissions
As recently as June 6, the school with 1,200 pupils stands on barren land, yet the nearby fig and mango trees still push back Mohammad to his childhood memories of the hunting game.
That hour, hungry students marched out of their classes eyeing the kitchen. The energy-efficient stove stood at the back of the school to the Eastern corridor where the rebels had earlier attacked them.
The kitchen was under renovation and the learners were seen carrying the bricks while they waited for the clock. The lunch service period lasted only a few minutes supervised by the matron.
With such a huge cost then, the schools which hosted the internally displaced camps were selected to benefit from parts of the US$ 70.98 million Project for Restoration of the Livelihood of Northern Region.
Of the 47 primary schools in Gulu district, six were supported due to historical imbalance with the war including Lokodi itself, Panyikworo, Patiko Prison, Paicho, Oguru, and Cwero primary school.
Each constructed a one-unit rectangular-shaped institutional energy measuring about 3 meters in length and about 1.5 meters in width using interlocking bricks to maximize heat dissipation for reduction of the firewood usage.
The simple energy-saving cooktop is made from clay liners, a metal housing, and vermiculite cement, which traps smoke to keep the cooking area cleaner while maintaining heat during the process.
For schools like Lukodi which battled the wood fuel crisis for ages, the current project provided them relief with spending on firewood falling by half from eight trucks per term to only four.
Oyet pointed out that the school was able to cut costs and invested an additional 7 million to build a one-block teachers’ residence in addition to building its own food store valued at 11 million.
Whereas the cook-stoves strive for efficient cooking, the lack of trees within the school and its neighbourhoods is yet another crisis the school authorities are yet to deal with.
Beatrice Lalam, the head cook of the school is not just overjoyed for the limited time she takes to prepare meals but the kitchen too is relatively good with a cleaner cooking environment for her.
Lalam noted that unlike previously when she would use 20 pieces of firewood to prepare for lunch, she now uses 6 instead but in a less irritating fumed environment.
“We used to take four hours to cook because our meals are mainly beans and posho but now we can only spend 90 minutes to prepare our lunch” Lalam proudly noted.
But away from school, Lalam has to trek over 5 kilometers looking for firewood, on a good day, she gets a bundle of dry wood with between 15 to 20 pieces to run her family for a week.
Every Sunday she rests from school but must cover a distance of kilometers looking for wood fuels, in a month, she is burdened with moving a distance of 40 km as she faces the energy crisis.
We have to travel ten kilometers in search of wood, according to Oyet. Although the trees are hard to come by, Oyet says, “We have planted an acre of soft wood and will plant more when we get more land.”
Far North-West in the neighbourhood stands yet another school which suffered the same fate of depletion of trees as it housed the displaced persons in the years of conflict.
That day, the 1,230 pupils of Panyikworo had just taken their lunch, the top-class pupils were on an internet semi-structure in the compound for revisions while the infantry classes were in playful moods.
The same cook stove facility ideally aided the on-time meal serving to these learners but the crisis of wood fuels is no different from other schools as managements hire trucks to move kilometers away.
The headteacher of the school Robert Okello Abala similarly noted that the expenditure on wood fuels per quarter reduces from 8 trips to currently 4 for running the term after introducing the cook-stoves.
“We have to grow wood now, so we have started planting softwood because the place we buy them from, which is about 6 km away, has trees that are going extinct,” Abala said.
Gulu District Education Officer Ceaser Akena observed that while a significant number of schools in the district have embraced the feeding program, the energy crisis remained challenging for the initiative.
He has however commended these schools for adopting wood farming adding that “this is good for both environmental protection and administrative cost effectiveness on fuels”
The ongoing environmental risks posed by burning wood fuels
Whereas the schools are partly relieved from the economic burden of fuel, scientific researches present overwhelming negative consequences of burning wood for cooking.
Each time a tree is burned, carbon dioxides which are captured when the tree is still alive are released into the environment, but trees can be replanted to replace their predecessors and reabsorb them.
A study by Maine Woodland Owners of 2020, a support-partnered forest steward organization reveals that, for every 1 ton of wood fuels burned, equivalent to 1,000 kgms of firewood, the amount of carbon dioxide released into an environment amounts to 3.67 tons impacting climate warming.
Thus, to offset the damage of 1,000 kgs of burned wood, about 41 trees are required to be planted and taken care of for absorption of such carbon emissions.
Literally, for Lukodi which consumes 24 tons of wood fuels for cooking every three months, its potential damage to nature is as much as the release of 88.08 tons of carbon dioxide to the environment.
Such a school will need 3,611 trees to offset its damage, translating to roughly 20 acres of tree cover, an acre is equivalent to between 100 to 200 trees, but the current climate action of the school only stands at an acre of trees planted.
The Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Environment at Gulu University Dr Kato Stonewall noted that climate change will hugely affect both man and nature without the conservation of tree species.
Dr Kato revealed the burning of trees is dangerous because each tree is made of carbon, gas and mineral and they keep building up in volume, size and height.
Dr Kato explains that carbon and gas form the largest composition,” the diameter can go up to 2 meters or 4 and the more years it leaves, the bigger carbons it captures”
Once a tree is burned, the white ashes remain very little while the carbons and gas captured escape and later form layers up in the atmosphere to impact the warming of the earth.
“Take an example when you burn a huge tree, we only see little white ashes remaining, where has the carbon gone up to contaminate the air? This is why we scientists say, don’t cut trees and burn” He added.
Dr. Kato however revealed that the best carbon capture are the grasses and bamboo trees, both grass and a bamboo tree have 4 units of carbon capture but the general trees have only three units.
He further explained that in science “We call it adenosine -triphosphate, an important energy molecule found in all life forms that work with enzymes such to transfer energy to cells by releasing it and so see the energy level of carbon capture in the grass and the bamboo tree is higher than the general tree”
Uganda’s energy balance
The April 2023 reports by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development presented biomass as the most utilized source of energy accounting for 90.5% in Uganda coming mainly from hardwood at 50%, pine trees at 35% and cypresses at 17% generally.
The total standing stock of biomass is estimated at 284.1 million tons with a potential sustainable biomass supply of 45 million tons but the Country’s connectivity rate of electricity is still one of the lowest in Africa at only 28% but access in rural areas stands at only 8% compared to Sub Shara Africa at 43%.
The widespread dependence on biomass energy resources for cooking and heating using insufficient or traditional cookstoves amounted to the rapid depletion of forests for firewood and charcoal.
Uganda suffers a degradation loss of 2.5 billion dollars of which 25% is from wood fuels while 2.6% of the forests are cut down annually for firewood, agriculture and charcoal, implying that the Country will lose all its forested land in the next 25 years if the trends continue without holistic interventions.
But at the strategic level, Uganda’s electricity policy sets a plan to achieve a 60% connection rate by 2027 representing 6,303,923 households both on-grid and off-grid with a proposed annual connection of 300,000 households which requires 558.4 million dollars to implement.
While at COP28, the African Development Bank President Akinwumi.A. Adesina noted with concern on the need for clan cooking “The goal of the African Clean Cooking Consortium is to drive meaningful, transformative change and assures 100% access to clean cooking in less than 10 years”
Globally, 2.3 billion people still depend on food cooked over open polluting or insufficient stoves with 1.5 billion people having access to clean cooking since 2010 while investment of clean cooking companies exceeded 200 million dollars by December 2023 according to the Clean Cooking Alliance annual report.
The revenue from clean cooking surpassed 100 million dollars for the first time with sales from carbon credits accounting for 22% of total revenue which was 45 times the amount of 2017.
Meanwhile, to ease the barriers to access to clean cooking, the African Development Bank and a Consortium of Civil Society Organizations working in the Energy Sector agreed during COP28 to mobilize 2 billion dollars for funding investments in the clean cooking sector over the next 10 years.
Building back the tree cover
The available records from the National Forestry Authority Aswa River Region show a total of 700,000 tree seedlings are approved for distribution to tree growers and institutional greening which can loosely save the earth to dispel 17,073 tons of carbon emissions if all are planted and reach their maturity.
The reports further note that from January to June this year, a total of 273,570 seedlings were issued out to refugee settlements in Lamwo and Adjumani districts where demands for wood fuels have cleared off trees from within the neighbourhoods notably pines, eucalyptus, mahogany and fruit trees.
The Sector Manager Aswa Region Patrick Nyeko disclosed in an interview that 500,000 tree seedlings are earmarked for refugee settlements in both Lamwo and Adjumani while 200,000 seedlings are meant to support institutional greening, the tree farmers in Omoro, Gulu, and Apac, Lamwo, Amuru and Adjumani.
The initiative is in line with the national community tree planting and protecting the Central Reserves with emphasis put on the restoration of the indigenous tree species that were destroyed through illegal logging, charcoal burning, agricultural mechanization or demand for wood fuels.
“We shall lease lands to private developers in those Central Reserves to plant trees while we keep monitoring for compliance where we shall tax them but we are already training the community on how to dig and plant those trees to boost their survival” Nyeko further noted.
