Review of the Past, Current, and the Future Trend of the Climate Change and its Impact in Uganda

Abstract

Climate change is a big problem in Sub-Saharan Africa because it brings about prolonged droughts and heavy rainfall that destroys crops. Further, heavy rainfall amounts throughout the entire region have caused flooding and landslides, thus leaving many houses destroyed and people and animals dead. However, the past, current, and future trends of climate change and its impact in Uganda remain unachieved. In this paper, we: 1) analyse the past, current, and future climate change in Uganda; 2) determine the relationship between climate variables; and 3) review the impact of climate change in Uganda. Our study employed the use of secondary data from authentic sources such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, journal articles, and books. We used Inverse Distance Weighing interpolation to show the trend of climate change in Uganda. We employed the PCA to show the variation between climate variables in different regions in Uganda. Our data shows that the mean ± SD of temperature (25.24±3.85), rainfall (1252.5±476.9), relative humidity (63.45±7.11), and solar (19.831±1.46) from 1982 to 2019. One Way ANOVA showed a significant difference between temperature (p = 0.003), relative humidity (p = 0.00), and solar radiation (p = 0.00), while rainfall did not vary between regions (p = 0.239). Our study evidences that the current climate change impacts in Uganda include prolonged drought, which causes water stress and increases crop loss, floods, landslides, invasion of locusts, rises in lake water levels, and floating islands on Lake Victoria.