KAMPALA, Uganda — Uganda’s oil developments are putting wetlands, wildlife and the communities that depend on them at risk through siltation, blocked waterways, floods,noise and air pollution, according to a new report by the Africa Institute for Energy Governance.
In the middle of the savannah grasslands, a herd of elephants graze by the roadside inside Uganda’s largest national park, Murchison Falls Park MFNP. Giraffes, elephants, bushbucks, and buffalo strut across the vast expanses of this savannah. A few meters away, the noise of bulldozers clearing an oil drilling site jars the calm of a sunny June day, as French oil giant TotalEnergies’ long-delayed Tilenga crude oil project roars to life.
It’s mid-morning at Itinga village, in Kenya’s Laikipia County, about 300km north of the capital, Nairobi. As the sun starts warming down onto the plains of Leparua Conservancy, Lemerwes Ntiti stands with a faded gaze at his goats as they graze on what’s left of the grass and shrubs after a long drought that saw them lose pasture and water as well.
When Jealousy Mugisa Mulimba, a 52-year-old father of nine in Uganda’s oil-rich Buliisa district, was informed he would need to move his family from his ancestral home because French oil giant TotalEnergies needed his three acres to build their central processing facility, he was reasonable. He didn’t put up a fight.He asked that the company give him three acres nearby; somewhere out of the way of the facility, but still near the place he’d always called home, the health facilities he and his family rely upon, and his kids’ schools.
KAMPALA, Uganda —Last week(July19),West African leaders of the Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS signed an intergovernmental agreement in Freetown, Sierra Leone, formally backing Africa's most ambitious fossil fuel project, the African Atlantic Gas Pipeline AAGP also previously known as the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline. The agreement moves the project from years of planning towards implementation by creating the legal framework for participating countries to cooperate. The proposed offshore natural gas pipeline will stretch between 5,600 and 6,800 kilometers along the Atlantic coast, connecting Nigeria with Morocco through 13 West African countries.
Ugandan farmers have filed a lawsuit in the High Court of England against a UK-registered company building the 900-mile oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean port city of Tanga, in what lawyers describe as a first-of-its-kind attempt to apply Ugandan climate, environmental, and constitutional law in a foreign court.
Following Verra's decision to re-certify the Northern Kenya Rangelands soil Carbon Project despite an Isiolo court ruling raising questions over the legal basis of some participating conservancies. I revisited an interview I conducted with climate justice and carbon markets expert Adrien Tofighi-Niaki www.aniaki.work in March. In this conversation, he explains what the case means for carbon markets, rights of Indigenous peoples and the future of carbon offsetting in Africa.
As China and other global powers sink investments to exploit Africa’s vast critical minerals needed to power the global green energy transition, some countries are increasingly bearing the environmental cost, health risks and social disruptions of the mineral rush.
As global energy markets are rocked by conflict and geopolitical instability, a new report by Oil Change International and Power Shift Africa finds that oil and gas production has failed to deliver economic development in Africa’s producing countries and is instead deepening vulnerability, inequality, and dependence.
For more than a year, activists successfully pressured dozens of large banks and insurers to pull their support of the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP. In March, the project finally secured long-delayed financing from syndicate banks to fund the development of a 900-mile crude oil pipeline from Ugandan oil fields to the Tanzanian port city of Tanga. Now activists are trying to stall the project in a new way: in local and regional courts.It is the latest indication that the $5 billion project will continue to face challenges.