When the National Environment Management Authority was set up in 1995, Uganda’s forests were shrinking, its swamps were being drained for farmland, and the country had no real mechanism to hold anyone accountable for environmental damage. Three decades later, NEMA has built institutions, written laws, and racked up some genuine wins. But the wetlands are still disappearing. The question is why?
There is a photograph that used to circulate at environmental conferences in Kampala. It shows the Lubigi wetland in the early 1990s a vast, unbroken stretch of papyrus running all the way to the horizon, the kind of green that makes you believe the earth is still young.
Find that same spot today and you will be standing in the middle of a suburb, with apartment blocks and a road cutting through what used to be a swamp. The wetland is still there, technically, but only barely.
It is a useful image to hold in your head when you sit down to take stock of what the National Environment Management Authority has achieved in 30 years. Because NEMA’s story is not a simple one. It is a story of real progress and real failure, often running side by side.
In May 1995. Uganda was still pulling itself back together after years of political violence. The economy was recovering, the population was growing fast, and land was being cleared everywhere for farms, for settlements, for charcoal. Nobody was really watching. There was no law with teeth, no agency with a mandate, and no culture of environmental accountability.
Into that gap came NEMA, established under the National Environment Act and becoming operational by the end of that year. Its brief was enormous: coordinate, monitor, regulate and supervise all environmental management across the country. Advise the government. Develop policy. Hold the line.
It is worth pausing on how ambitious that was, for an institution that started with modest resources, a skeletal staff, and a public that had never really been asked to think about the environment as something to protect.
I will surely give credit where it is due. NEMA has done things over the past 30 years that, without it, probably would not have happened at all.
The most foundational of these is the legal and regulatory architecture it has helped build. Uganda now has one of the more comprehensive environments on paper in East Africa and that is the National Environment Act revised in 2019, regulations covering waste management, noise pollution, oil spill response, mountainous areas, wetland management, and more.
Before 1995, most of this simply did not exist. Developers could put up a factory next to a river without anyone asking what they planned to do with the effluent.
The Environmental and Social Impact Assessment process the requirement that major projects prove they will not destroy what they are built on is now a genuine part of how business gets done in Uganda.
NEMA’s recent launch of ELMIS, its automated licensing and management system, has pushed this process online and made it faster, reducing the back-and-forth that used to swallow months.
Seventy NEMA staff, 40 lead agencies, and 170 environmental practitioners were trained on the platform when it rolled out in 2024. That is not glamorous work, but it matters.
NEMA has also expanded its physical footprint, establishing regional offices and putting aside a dedicated enforcement unit.
The authority has signed partnerships with the Buganda Kingdom with international bodies, and is now implementing a National Environment Research Agenda that runs through 2029, setting priorities across climate, pollution, biodiversity, land, and the water-food-energy nexus.
During their recent 30th anniversary event at the Sheraton Kampala Hotel, NEMA Executive Director Barirega Akankwasah highlighted the authority’s efforts in expanding its workforce and establishing an enforcement unit, which he noted as key indicators of institutional growth. He emphasized the importance of digitization in government licensing as well.
“Among other achievements, digitization has transformed environmental stewardship in Uganda by enabling all environmental licensing processes to be conducted online through ELMIS. This shift has resulted in a more than 500% increase in the processing of environmental assessments and audit applications between 2021 and 2025,” revealed Executive Director Barirega.
Uganda has received international recognition for some of what it has done on biodiversity conservation. Uganda is home to nearly 19,000 species of flora and fauna, 380 species of mammals and over a thousand species of birds. That richness has not entirely disappeared, and NEMA has played a part in holding it together.
Here is the part that is harder to celebrate, When NEMA was born in 1995, wetlands covered about 15.5 per cent of Uganda’s total land area. By the time the Uganda Wetlands Atlas was compiled, that figure had dropped to 8.9 per cent. Between 1994 and 2008 alone, the national area of wetlands shrank by 30 per cent.
The government’s own environment ministry has estimated that Uganda is currently losing 2.5 per cent of its remaining wetlands every year. At that rate, projections suggest that by 2040, a mere 1.6 per cent of the country’s wetlands will be left.
Let that number sit for a moment. From 15.5 per cent to 1.6 per cent. In less than a lifetime.
The costs are not abstract. The Uganda Wetlands Atlas puts the annual economic damage from wetland destruction at roughly two billion shillings. Contamination of water resources, made worse by the loss of the wetlands that used to filter that water, costs the country 38 billion shillings every year. Wetlands regulate floods, recharge groundwater, support fisheries, and store carbon. When they go, communities, especially poor ones that depend directly on them, feel it immediately.
In the eastern sub-region of Teso, rice farmers have moved onto the banks of the Awoja tributary, which feeds water to 16 districts. In Kampala, the Kinawataka wetland has been eaten up by factories and unplanned housing, with raw effluent draining straight into the streams that flow into Lake Victoria. In Wakiso, Mbarara, Gulu, Masaka, Rukungiri, the story repeats itself, different names, same pattern.
The most frustrating thing is that the policies exist. The 1995 Constitution protects the environment. The National Environment Act prohibits wetland drainage and encroachment. Uganda has been a member of the Ramsar Convention on wetlands since 1988. NEMA has won in the Supreme Court in the Nyakana case the country’s highest court affirmed that the state has a constitutional duty to protect the environment, even against private property rights.
Yet legal commentators have noted the bitter irony that the early Supreme Court victory has been followed by decades of poor enforcement.
The question they ask is a sharp one, how did the country move from that landmark ruling to a situation of near-total impunity for wetland encroachers?
Part of the answer is resources. NEMA has historically been underfunded relative to its mandate, trying to police an entire country’s environment with limited staff, limited transport, and limited political backing when it bumps up against powerful interests.
The Auditor General’s 2018 report pointed out that the Wetlands Management Department had been too slow to gazette wetlands, making it impossible to clearly establish where the boundaries were, which in turn made enforcement nearly impossible to execute.
There is also the problem that land brokers have long sold swampy land to buyers who either did not know it was a wetland or chose not to ask. NEMA recently published all 8,613 gazetted wetlands to try to close that gap. But the listings came after decades of titles already granted, buildings already built, and communities already settled.
Research has also found a stubborn pattern,even when encroachers are evicted, they tend to return. Without alternative livelihoods for the poor communities that depend on wetlands to survive, enforcement alone cannot hold. The eviction happens. The buildings come back.
At the political level, mixed signals have not helped. The President of Uganda HE Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, has at different times called for the protection of wetlands and acknowledged that many of them now have factories on them that “cannot be removed.” When the message from the top is ambiguous, it is difficult for a regulatory agency to enforce consistently.
Wetlands are the most visible failure, but they are not the only one. Uganda’s forest cover has declined sharply over NEMA’s lifetime, with population pressure and agricultural expansion the main drivers.
Plastic pollution is severe. Single-use plastics make up 93 per cent of imported plastics in Uganda, 98 per cent of which ends up as waste, and less than 10 per cent is recycled.
Air quality in Kampala is poor. The East African Crude Oil Pipeline, running through sensitive wetland catchments in the western part of the country, raises concerns that environmental watchdogs say have not been adequately addressed in the project’s assessments.
None of this is entirely NEMA’s fault. The authority operates inside a political economy that does not always want it to succeed. Economic pressure is real.
Population growth in Uganda has more than doubled since 1995 puts enormous stress on land. Poverty means that the choice between protecting a swamp and growing food to eat is not a theoretical dilemma for millions of Ugandans.
But the agency is not without responsibility either. Selective enforcement, cracking down on small encroachers while larger, politically connected developers operate freely, has eaten into NEMA’s credibility with the public. If the law bends for the powerful, ordinary people stop taking it seriously.
At the anniversary event, leaders spoke of the urgent need for collective action, for more resources, for technology, for community involvement. All of that is true.
Uganda’s remaining wetlands need to be mapped, gazetted, and defended not selectively, but consistently. NEMA’s regional offices need genuine capacity, not just presence. Alternative livelihoods for wetland-adjacent communities need to be real, not token gestures.
The government’s Ten-Year Action Plan for restoration of environmental and natural resources, running from 2021 to 2030, gives a framework.
The cancellation of illegal land titles in critical urban wetlands was a step. Restoration operations at Lubigi, Kabaka’s Lake, and Nakiyanja in Mukono have shown that recovery is possible when there is political will to follow through.
But plans and operations are only as good as the commitment behind them. The pattern of the last 30 years, strong policy, weak enforcement, cannot continue for another 30. The arithmetic of wetland loss makes that brutally clear.
NEMA turns 30, having built something real. The regulatory foundation it laid did not exist before it arrived. The people who have led it, from the late Tom Okurut through Henry Aryamanya Mugisha to the current Executive Director Barirega Akankwasah, have done difficult work in a difficult environment.
But the wetlands are still disappearing. The papyrus is still giving way to concrete. And the question Uganda must answer honestly, without ceremony, is whether the next 30 years will be different.
