Vanishing Ice, Falling Ground: Uganda's Two-Front Climate Crisis
Uganda's climate emergency is playing out on two mountains at once, on opposite sides of the country, and one of them involves ice that most people don't associate with Africa at all.
In the Rwenzori Mountains, on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, sit some of the last tropical glaciers on Earth outside the Andes. When British explorers first surveyed them in 1906, ice capped all six of the range's peaks. Today, more than 80% of that ice is gone, according to research summarized by Grist and Yale Environment 360, and scientists project the rest could disappear within a decade, sooner than the 2050 timeline the United Nations has set for the likely loss of East Africa's glaciers generally. Enock Bwambale, a mountain guide who has led climbers up Mount Rwenzori for years, put it simply to a Christian Science Monitor reporter standing at what used to be the base of a much larger ice field.
"This is all that's left." His fellow guide, Uziah Kule, described the same disappearance to Yale Environment 360 in blunter terms: "Up there nowadays, there's no glacier. The glacier we only get it in the valley here."
The consequences aren't just symbolic. Roughly 5 million people living in the foothills below the Rwenzoris depend on glacier meltwater during the dry season, and that supply is shrinking along with the ice, according to the Monitor's reporting. Richard Taylor, a University College London geographer who has studied the range for two decades, has said the recession of these glaciers "sends an unambiguous message of a changing climate" in the region, one of the clearest, most visible signals available anywhere in East Africa, precisely because everyone can watch the ice retreat year over year in a way that slower changes elsewhere can't match.
Roughly 500 kilometers away, on the slopes of Mount Elgon near Kasese, the opposite corner of the country, the mechanism is different, but the driver is the same. Elgon is not glaciated; it's a 24-million-year-old extinct volcano whose fertile soil supports more than 500,000 farmers on its lower slopes. But Uganda's National Environment Management Authority has explained that the same warming destabilizing the Rwenzori ice is also loading the atmosphere with more moisture, roughly 7% more for every 1°C of warming, which produces what the agency calls "fast rainfall formation characterized by flash floods.
That extra intensity, rather than extra total rainfall, is what has turned Elgon's slopes lethal: more than a thousand people there have died in landslides over the past decade, a toll officials believe is undercounted since some victims are never recovered.
What's gone wrong in both places follows a similar shape: known, worsening risk outpacing the response built to manage it. On Elgon, authorities have identified high-risk communities for resettlement, but the process has moved slower than the disasters. Uganda counts roughly 95,000 people still displaced by past disasters, and a dam designed to buffer floodwater on the Sio and Mpologoma rivers in Butaleja was never completed.
Lamula Were, Butaleja's district natural resources officer, told the Monitor newspaper the dam could have prevented much of the region's recent flooding. In the Rwenzoris, there is no equivalent engineering fix; glacier loss at this scale isn't something local infrastructure can reverse, which is why Taylor and other scientists frame the mountains mainly as a monitoring and adaptation priority: tracking meltwater decline closely enough that downstream communities can plan for the dry-season water shortages already arriving, rather than being caught by them.
Some adaptation is already visible on Elgon, where farmers like Francis Gidegi have replanted native trees and changed crops to slow erosion, part of a wider push including the Common Ground program launched in 2022 and the earlier Manafwa Watershed Project from 2019. A local conservation figure identified as Mugagga told Yale Environment 360 the results are measurable: "In terms of where we started from, you see a lot of change in terms of the areas being safeguarded against soil erosion.
What's missing, in both the Elgon lowlands and the Rwenzori highlands, is speed: faster resettlement funding, completed rather than stalled flood infrastructure, and water-security planning for communities about to lose a glacier-fed supply that has sustained them for generations.
Martha Nimusiima is a journalist, writer, and reporter with a passion for storytelling and a keen eye for detail. With a background that spans writing and reporting, Martha brings depth and clarity to every story she covers. A self-described tech enthusiast, she stays at the forefront of emerging trends, blending her journalistic expertise with a curiosity for how technology is shaping the world. Whether crafting compelling narratives or breaking news, Martha is committed to informing and inspiring her audience. She is based in Kampala, Uganda.
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