Environmental quality has been decreasing in most countries in the world. The efforts to reduce environmental degradation must be comprehensive enough and the priority of environmental policies should in the first place, targeting poverty reduction (Masron and Subramaniam, 2018).

If I look back to the 1950s when I was in my early teens and compare then and now, the Uganda environment is far less liveable today than in the 1950s because our country has become environmentally poorer.

A poor environment is the theatre of all kinds of poverty, including income poverty, academic poverty, intellectual poverty, social poverty. ethical poverty, cultural poverty, economic poverty, biological poverty, ecological poverty, spiritual poverty, moral poverty, justice poverty and environmental poverty.

All these types of poverty constitute one spectrum of general human poverty.  Even environment poverty in every dimension of the environment -ecological-biological, socioeconomic dimension, socio-cultural dimension, and temporal or time dimension -is integral to the general human poverty. The environmental and humanity have since time immemorial been interconnected. If the human condition is poor, the environment condition will also be poor and vice versa.

A poor environment or environment poverty can also be called ecological poverty (World Poverty, 2025). However, it can also be called environmental poverty, or better still ecological-environmental poverty. This is poverty that is hardly targeted by governments, regional bodies or global bodies all of which target income, financial or economic poverty

The more indigenous societies that had long relied directly on their environment and ecologies, as through farming, had generally learned how to best maintain their natural environment so that a reasonable living could be sustained for thousands of years (e.g. World Poverty, 2025) They cared about ecological-environmental poverty and did everything possible to conquer this poverty in order to improve their human condition through the times. They were much richer ecologically and environmentally than we are today. They did not need to incessantly borrow from other societies on other continents to balance their human condition with their ecologies and environments. Environmental degradation in all the dimensions of the environment was minimal. They lived with the restraints and constraints imposed upon them naturally through time. Thus, the environment of poverty (e.g., BusinessDay, 2024) was a survival environment.

The poor often displayed and still display pro-environmental behaviours, environmental stewardship and pro-environmental attitudes that challenge this notion (Frederich Kirsten, Lumengo Bonga-Bonga, Mduduzi Biyase, 2024). They were naturally environmentally-concerned. Even today environmental concern is high at low levels of poverty but reaches a poverty threshold beyond which further impoverishment leads to reduced environmental concern. However, while this tendency offers policymakers critical insight for designing environmental policies tailored to varying levels of poverty and provide new insight into the poverty reduction and environment degradation discussion (Frederich Kirsten, Lumengo Bonga-Bonga, Mduduzi Biyase, 2024).

The relationship between environmental degradation and poverty has gained importance in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While poverty is known to drive environmental degradation, environmental degradation disproportionately affects the poor and reinforces the poverty-environment trap (Frederich Kirsten, Lumengo Bonga-Bonga, Mduduzi Biyase, 2024).

In this article I want to focus on environmental poverty in Africa with special reference to Uganda. Environmental poverty already affects millions of people around the world (Borja Santos, 2021). Let me start by asking “What is environmental poverty?”

Lee Liu (2012) uses the concept of “environmental poverty” to refer to the lack of the healthy, clean and safe environment needed for society’s survival and development as a direct result of human-induced environmental degradation. He adds that some communities may prosper at the expense of other communities, which may fall into environmental poverty and eventually irreversible environmental degradation and economic failure. This was the case under colonialism and is the case under neocolonialism.

It is apparently the case under Musevenism and Musevenomics in Uganda whereupon one small group in power is accessing and exploiting resources for its greed and selfishness at the expense of the indigenous peoples who naturally own those resources but have artificially been dispossessed by the Constitution of Uganda 1995.

The 1995 Constitution, designed by the very group of people in power today strategically places all the natural resources of Uganda in the singular hands of the President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, who has several times stated that what matters today are interests, not identities (of the indigenous groups of Ugandans. The interests are political, military, economic, financial, as well as the use of these to dominate and conquer the indigenes well in the future.

Wherever the resources are located people did not only have their belonging disrupted but people of exogenous identities are clandestinely exploiting those resources and exporting them to enrich themselves with no return to the indigenous owners of the resources. This is the case especially in Karamoja and Busoga, which are financially poor and are said to be the poorest subregions in Uganda but mineral-rich.

Karamoja is rich in gold and bauxite. Busoga is rich uranium, gold, oil, platinum, nickel and a diversity of rare earth minerals. The two subregions are suffering massive environmental degradation. The degraders are either Indians or Chinese or refugees or former refugees connected to power in government. Local leaders have been depoliticised and deradicalised to such an extent that they and their people are just onlookers as the wealth of their subregions is stolen.

In Busoga for example, the disempowered impoverished people are being further impoverished by imposed environmental degradation (e.g., Barbier, 2017) and by schemes such as Operation Wealth Creation, Bonna Baggagawale, Myooga and Parish Development Model and agricultural schemes such as sugarcane growing and oil palm growing.

While all these are being advocated and popularised as development, they are now the root cause of environmental poverty and the de-development of Busoga in particular and Uganda in general.

There is a crisis of environmental poverty in Busoga in particular and Uganda in general. There can be no development, transformation and progress in Busoga and Uganda in a sea of environmental poverty.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for – Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).For God and my country

Further reading

Barbier, Edward B. (2017). How Environmental Degradation Impoverishes the Poor. Environmental Science,   Published online: 24 May 2017 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.403 https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-403 Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13:34 pm EAT.

Borja Santos (2021). Environmental poverty already affects millions of people around the world. School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs, 11 November 2021. https://www.ie.edu/school-politics-economics-global-affairs/publications/environmental-poverty-already-affects-millions-of-people-around-the-world/ Visited on 07 May 2025 at 12:29 pm EAT.

BusinessDay (2024). The Environment of Poverty. BusinessDay June 192024. https://businessday.ng/analysis/article/the-environment-of-poverty/ Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13:40 pm EAT

Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (2020). Environmental Poverty, UIA, October 4 2020. https://encyclopedia.uia.org/problem/environmental-poverty Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13:11pm EAT.

Kirsten, Frederich and Bonga-Bonga, Lumengo and Biyase, Mduduzi (2024). Escaping the poverty-environment trap: exploring the nonlinear relationship between poverty and environmental concern in the Southern African Development Community Countries. MPRA, 18 Oct 2024 https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122428/1/MPRA_paper_122428.pdf Visited on 07 May 2025 at 12:47.

Lee Liu (2012). Environmental poverty, a decomposed environmental Kuznets curve, and alternatives: Sustainability lessons from China. Ecological Economics Volume 73, 15 January 2012, Pages 86-92.

Masron, T. A., & Subramaniam, Y. (2018). Does Poverty Cause Environmental Degradation? Evidence from Developing Countries. Journal of Poverty, 23(1), 44–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2018.1500969

Mirei Takashima Claremon (2021). Why poverty is bad for the Environment – and for All of Us.  Age of Awareness, Jun 14, 2021 https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-poverty-is-bad-for-the-environment-9795f0ff5c9f Visited on 07 May 2025 at 12:57 pm EAT.

Morgan, Justin (2021). Environmental Solutions to Poverty. The Borgen Project, August 5 2021. https://borgenproject.org/environmental-solutions-to-poverty/ Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13:16 pm EAT.

Niringiye, Aggrey, Stephen Wambugu and Joseph Karugia (2010). An Investigation of the Poverty-Environmental Degradation Nexus: A Case Study of Katonga Basin in Uganda. Research Journal of Environmental and Earth Sciences 2 (2) April 2010 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49593844_An_Investigation_of_the_Poverty-_Environmental_Degradation_Nexus_A_Case_Study_of_Katonga_Basin_in_Uganda Visited on 07 May 2025 at 12:36 pm EAT

Ruiu, M.L., Ragnedda, M. (2024). The Environmental Dimension of Poverty. In: Digital-Environmental Poverty. Palgrave Studies in Digital Inequalities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56184-9_4 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-56184-9_4#citeas Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13:28 pm EAT.

World Ocean Review (?). The Vicious Cycle of Poverty and Environmental Degradation. https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-4/how-the-sea-serves-us/oceans-under-threat/the-vicious-cycle-of-poverty-and-environmental-destruction/ Visited on 07 May 2025 at 12:42 pm EAT.

World Poverty (2025). Environment Poverty: A tough Place to Leave in.  World Poverty, 2025 https://world-poverty.org/environmentpoverty.htm Visited on 07 May 2025 at 13;22 pm EAT.