Uganda’s wildlife is in trouble, and almost everyone who took the floor at 2nd day of the inaugural National Biodiversity and Conservation Research Symposium in Kampala said so plainly. Habitats are shrinking. Lion numbers in Kidepo Valley National Park are sliding. Human-wildlife conflict is rising. And the three-horned chameleon, once a creature of the Rwenzori’s lower forests, is being pushed uphill by a warming climate, into territory it has never needed before.
What the symposium offered wasn’t a single dramatic announcement, but something arguably more useful: a candid, occasionally uncomfortable conversation about what Uganda actually knows about its own biodiversity, what it doesn’t, and why that gap matters.
For John Makombo, Commissioner for Biodiversity Management at the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), the research case is almost embarrassingly simple. “A lot of work has been done in UWA estates to improve wildlife conservation, but research has been critical in helping us understand exactly what we are managing,” he told delegates. “You cannot manage what you do not know.”
That’s not an abstraction. Makombo pointed to one of UWA’s more striking findings: research in the Mgahinga mountain gorilla sanctuaries uncovered evidence that disease can pass between local communities and gorilla animals that share roughly 97.8% of their genetic material with humans.
“We have done a lot of research on zoonosis disease transmission, and we have seen how we can transmit disease from humans to the gorillas. And so in doing this, we have put in place interventions that are going to minimise that transmission. It’s a rare case where a scientific paper translated almost directly into a protocol that protects both species,” he said.
Climate research is delivering similarly concrete, if unsettling, signals. We used to get the three-horned chameleon in the lower forests of the Rwenzori. Now, because of changes in temperatures and global warming, it is moving to the eastern zone to higher ground where it can survive. These are the signals climate research is giving us, and we must act on them.”Makombo explained
If there was a moment of real candour at the symposium, it came from Dr. Emmanuel Akampurira, Manager of Research at the Uganda Wildlife Research and Training College (UWRTC), who didn’t pretend the country’s research culture is working as well as it should.
“Sometimes, we become so focused on our academic pursuits that our publications fail to create real-world impact. His approach emphasizes the importance of structural changes over mere rhetoric: establishing direct partnerships between academic institutions like UWRTC and practitioners such as UWA. This collaboration helps ensure that research findings move from journal pages to practical application more swiftly. By creating joint platforms with UWA, which are the primary managers of wildlife on the ground, we can turn research results into meaningful actions that truly benefit conservation. He described the symposium as an opportunity to share research findings and assess our progress in this area.” He revealed.
It’s a tension familiar to conservation scientists everywhere, the gap between what gets published and what gets practised and Uganda’s research community seemed unusually willing to say so out loud rather than paper over it.
Dr. Caroline Asiimwe, Assistant Commissioner for Research and Ecological Monitoring at UWA, raised a different concern: it isn’t only well-known species like lions and elephants that are under threat, it’s the ones nobody is tracking closely enough to notice their decline.
“Some species are disappearing, and we don’t fully understand why, because insufficient research has been conducted on them. Climate change is not acting alone; it is exacerbating the issue by enabling invasive species to thrive in environments where they previously could not survive. Climate change directly impacts ecosystems and contributes to the rise of invasive species. There is a pressing need to better understand these interactions and to conduct more studies that can help alleviate pressure on biodiversity. She emphasized the importance of collaborating with specialized partners who focus on these neglected species, ensuring that conservation resources are allocated based on actual evidence rather than assumptions.” She revealed.
A recurring theme, echoed by nearly every speaker, was that Uganda’s conservation institutions have too often worked in parallel rather than together, duplicating studies, missing opportunities to share data, and diluting whatever impact their individual efforts might have had.
UWA’s Executive Director, Dr. James Musinguzi, was perhaps the most direct about it. “There are many threats afflicting our biodiversity and our wildlife. These threats and gaps must be closed by using empirical data and evidence picked from research, not assumptions, not politics. Science.
Dr Musinguzi framed the UWA–UWRTC partnership behind the symposium as a deliberate response to years of institutional silos. “We need to work in a coordinated manner as government institutions so that we can use limited resources to produce a huge impact. This symposium is proof that collaboration and partnership can yield much greater results.”
To back that up, UWA used the symposium to announce two concrete commitments: a peer-reviewed research journal to publish Ugandan conservation science for a global audience, and a centralised national biodiversity data repository intended to pool findings currently scattered across institutions.
Dr Musinguzi was candid that the repository isn’t purely altruistic; he sees it as a way to draw in international research partnerships and the fees and collaborations that come with them. “We are going to generate funds from research. We are setting up a depository of knowledge, and that knowledge has value.” He said.
UWRTC’s Principal, Robert Baluku, described a near-identical ambition from the academic side: a Uganda Wildlife Research Journal and a Research Ethics Committee to oversee wildlife studies conducted in the country, alongside a shared wildlife research database that researchers, policymakers and practitioners could all draw on. He also placed the conversation in a wider economic frame, noting that Uganda’s biodiversity isn’t only an ecological asset but a foundation for livelihoods and development, which is part of why, he argued, the country can’t afford to keep losing it to “assumptions” rather than addressing it with “evidence-based innovation and collective action.”
It was a remarkably unified message from the government, regulators, and research institutions alike. However, it is important to note that the funding and implementation needed for these ambitions are currently more about commitments than completed projects.