- Recognized as a “Tree City of the World,” Uganda’s capital city of Kampala has set out on a journey to transform its urban forest into a resilient, native-rich landscape.
- What began as a response to falling trees has become a comprehensive environmental strategy tackling health, equity and climate change.
- Kampala has recently expanded its mission to increase green spaces to include biodiversity and connecting wildlife corridors throughout the city.
KAMPALA — Ten years ago, Uganda’s capital Kampala was facing a strange problem: trees were falling over on the city’s streets, injuring people and damaging cars and property. The municipality investigated, and found that the problem was mainly caused by aging and unhealthy trees.
What followed was an initiative by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) that not only solved the immediate problem of falling trees, but also led to long-term improvements in the city’s green infrastructure and its climate resilience.
In 2016, the KCCA launched a two-year citywide tree audit, in which 10 foresters and two statisticians counted and assessed every tree in four of the city’s central districts: Kololo, Nakasero, Mulago and Makerere.
“There was no baseline data — we didn’t know what we have and where we are coming from,” said urban forester Padde Daniel from the KCCA when he spoke to Mongabay during the Urban Forest Forum in Johannesburg, South Africa, earlier this year.
Daniel was one of the young urban forestry graduates called in by the KCCA to lead the effort. He and his colleagues manually counted trees across public and private land, including parks and institutions. Documenting 23 parameters, including size, location, species classification and health condition, the team assessed some 53,000 trees comprising more than 300 species in 2016 alone. Of these, 80% were exotic species; only 20% were native to the region.
At the time, urban greening had little visibility in Kampala’s public discourse. Due to the lack of funding for digital tools, Daniel and his teammates carried out their work by hand, with pens and paper.
“We had to explain to people what an urban forester is and what kind of work we do, and how it will help the city,” said Marvin Kibalama Bogere, a forestry and conservation scientist currently doing his doctoral degree at the Tokyo University of Agriculture (NODAI).
“At first, many city staff didn’t understand why trees were being ‘audited,’” Padde said, “In science, we call it an inventory, the trees are our assets.”
Nearly a decade later, that perception has changed. As urban forests and green spaces have been gaining recognition as important contributors to environmental, social and economic well-being in cities around the world, Kampala has become an example of how to do it right.
In 2021, Kampala was selected as the first African city to be recognized as a “Tree City of the World” by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The designation recognizes municipal commitments to trees and urban forestry.
“No capital city in Africa has done more than Kampala in studying and documenting its urban forest,” Catharine Watson, senior adviser at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) told Mongabay. “However, they face a really uphill battle in greening the city. Old trees are constantly being cut down for roads. The skyscrapers going up do not observe the portion of the plot that are meant for green,” she said.
Like other cities in Africa, Kampala — Uganda’s largest city, with a population of 1.8 million — faces the challenge of rapid urbanization, which competes directly for urban green spaces.
“Trees are a public health intervention, a biodiversity intervention and a job creator,” Watson said, adding that politicians and civil servants need to recognize the myriad benefits of urban forests.
Kampala has benefited from governmental buy-in, according to Daniel — particularly from the city’s mayor. “Currently we have the political backing at mayor level, which gives us the strength to continue doing what we’re doing.”
Since tree-counting efforts first began in 2016, Kampala has mapped some 200 hectares (about 500 acres) of green space, georeferenced 134,000 trees across four of its five divisions, and committed to planting at least 8,000 trees annually. Much of this work is done using geomapping tools and remote-sensing technologies that are supported by development partners such as the FAO.
The initial audit revealed eye-opening findings that laid the foundation for long-term intervention.
“We found that there were disparities between different locations: Some areas had healthy tree cover, others barely had any trees,” Daniel said.
Using the initial data set, Kampala developed a 20-year strategy called the Urban Forest Management Plan. A document describing the project, which is not publicly available but which Mongabay has reviewed, it lays out how the city plans to increase the diversity of native tree species, create a structured framework for managing the urban forest, raise public awareness, and increase tree density from 13 to 30 trees per acre (32-74 trees per hectare) across the city.
“The protection that the trees provide are immediately tangible,” Bogere said, citing to the urban heat island effect, which describes the phenomenon of heat accumulating in built environments, like city centers. “If we get the numbers in the strategy on track, we may be able to reduce the urban heat island effect in the central business district.”
According to Daniel, implementing the Urban Forest Management Plan can improve more than just the urban heat island effect — it can help with flooding and air quality, as well. “Our air quality is beyond WHO recommended levels,” he said.
Like many other cities around the world, Kampala has been experiencing more extreme weather events in recent years, including higher temperatures, heavier rainfall, and more severe flooding. In response, city planners and ecologists are looking to trees as an efficient way to mitigate some of these challenges.
But both Daniel and Bogere said that in order to effect change, long-term maintenance is key.
“Urban forestry in Kampala is not about planting trees, it’s about growing them,” Daniel said. “We need those trees to survive past the first and second dry seasons.”
Daniel added that their vision was not just to count seedlings, but to ensure their survival and to help integrate them into the city’s ecology.
A tree planted along a sidewalk that dies within a year doesn’t serve its purpose. For this reason, Kampala introduced what practitioners call the “Tree Health Monitoring Dashboard,” a digital tool developed with the FAO that tracks the health and survival of each tree in real time. It supports early interventions, monitors risk and helps with ongoing decision-making.
With growing concerns over biodiversity loss, Kampala is currently busy with the next step toward becoming more climate-resilient and wildlife-friendly: improving the city’s “blue infrastructure” by integrating engineered water systems with natural wetlands and rivers. Ultimately, city planners aim to develop a green and blue infrastructure master plan.
“We didn’t only stop at the flora, but asked: What about the fauna and the biodiversity?” Daniel said. “Are we ensuring the wildlife is taken care of?”
Kampala is home to many kinds of wildlife, some of them listed as species of conservation concern. In a 2023 survey preceding the city’s master plan, which Mongabay has reviewed but which hasn’t been published online, the city identified potential biodiversity corridors to connect wildlife habitat fragmented by urbanization. The aim is to allow birds, butterflies and other wildlife to move between green zones.
For Daniel, the challenge remains that outside municipalities lack the public buy-in and political will for adequate planning.
“Without structured land use, floodplains are built over, hills erode, and temperatures go up,” he said, adding that a crucial part of getting it right is to involve the community. “If people understand why we’re planting and how it benefits them, they will take ownership. And that’s when change really sticks.”
“We have the climate, and we have the people,” Bogere said. “The climate wants trees to grow, and the people want them too.”
Banner image: View of central Kampala. Image by Padde Daniel.
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Citation:
Ettinger, A. K., Bratman, G. N., Carey, M., Hebert, R., Hill, O., Kett, H., … Wyse, L. (2024). Street trees provide an opportunity to mitigate urban heat and reduce risk of high heat exposure. Scientific Reports, 14(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-51921-y
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