Hakimu Sseviiri

International bodies, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are increasingly considering adaptation efforts in urban informal settlements in their core agendas. Although urban informal settlements serve as sites for seeding and scaling locally led initiatives, existing literature sometimes overlooks the intersection of climatic and non-climatic governance risks when exploring transformative adaptation pathways. A systematic review of the scientific literature addresses four lines of questioning: what actions are taken to confront flood-related risks in African urban informal settlements? Who are the salient actors across different scales, and how are they empowered to act? What forms of climatic and non-climatic governance risks emerge and intersect because of the actions taken? What shifts in actor collaborations are unfolding and pertinent with potential to transform adaptation governance from the local to the global level? POLICY RELEVANCE Adaptation governance reform processes – whether legal, technological, social, economic, environmental or institutional – ought to consider both the scalability and the unique governance risks of initiatives emanating from urban informal settlements. Community-led waste recovery and recycling initiatives demonstrate this complexity. These initiatives simultaneously reduce emissions, create clean urban spaces, boost household incomes and mitigate waterborne health risks during floods. However, scaling these co-benefits requires governance frameworks that not only couple climate mitigation with adaptation but also enable cohesion between top-down government strategies and bottom-up community efforts to minimise elite capture and vested interest groups from dominating public participation. This ensures that responses shift from prioritising short-term relief to building cross-sector coalitions that can translate promising practices into structured, long-term action.

Background: Extreme temperatures are a key indicator of climate change, and the frequency and intensity of deadly heatwaves are projected to rise. Heat already poses a major public health threat, with over a billion people exposed globally, and yet Africa is warming faster than the global average. Tropical countries such as Uganda are expected to experience hotter conditions and growing cooling needs. However, extreme heat remains under-studied in tropical climates, especially in Africa. Although there is no single universal definition of heatwaves, current evidence generally identifies heatwaves as periods of unusually high temperatures relative to local climates.Objective: This study aims to assess the spatio-temporal characteristics of heatwaves in Uganda and their trends.Methods: We analyzed daily temperature data from 31 meteorological stations across Uganda over a 34-year period to assess national and regional trends. Heat extremes were characterized using three complementary heatwave metrics: the 90th percentile of maximum temperature (TX90), the Heat Index (HI), and the Excess Heat Factor (EHF). To describe temperature extremes and warming rates, the mean Tmax was calculated per year, month, and zone. The hottest and coolest years and months were identified by their respective Tmax values, while trends in monthly mean Tmax were estimated using linear regression. The slopes were expressed as °C per decade, and the months with the fastest warming and cooling rates were reported alongside their corresponding p-values. Stations were classified according to the ten climatological zones and zonal aggregation was performed to summarize station-level heatwave metrics into broader climatic regions, thereby capturing spatial patterns while reducing sensitivity to local variability.Results: Uganda has warmed by an average of 1.7°C over the past three decades. February consistently emerges as the hottest month, while July and November are generally the coolest, with some regional variation. The year 2016 was the hottest on record, with the highest mean maximum temperature of 30.35°C recorded in northern Uganda. Across all stations, the proportion of days classified as heatwave days increased significantly, rising by an average of 0.2 percentage points per year between 1990 and 2023.Heatwave characteristics exhibit strong spatial and temporal variability. Annual heatwave prevalence at individual stations ranges from years with no heatwaves to years exceeding 20–30%, with notable peaks in 1998, 2003, 2010, and 2023. The annual average number of heatwave events fluctuates widely, from 0 to more than 15 events per year at some stations. After 2015, more stations experienced frequent and intense episodes, indicating a clear intensification of heatwaves. Seasonally, heatwaves occur most often from June to August, with additional clusters in February –April and October–November. Sparse heatwave prevalence in the 1990s contrasts sharply with the dense occurrence of heatwave days in recent years.Conclusion: Uganda is experiencing significant warming and a marked increase in both the frequency and intensity of heatwaves. This multi-metric characterization provides a robust foundation for understanding heat risk in a tropical African context, informs the design of heat-related policies and early warning systems, and offers a methodological framework applicable to other countries assessing evolving heatwave hazards.

Urbanicity is a recognized determinant of mental health, yet conventional measures such as population density or the rural–urban divide often fail to capture the complex realities of informal settlements in low- and middle-income countries. This paper conceptualizes neighborhood effects through the lived experiences of young women in Kampala, Uganda, drawing on participatory research from the NIH-funded TOPOWA study. Using community mapping and Photovoice, participants identified neighborhood features that shape wellbeing, including sanitation facilities, drainage systems, alcohol outlets, health centers, schools, boda boda stages (motorcycle taxis), lodges, religious institutions, water sources, markets, and recreational spaces. These methods revealed both stressors—poor waste management, flooding, violence, gendered harassment, crime, and alcohol-related harms—and protective resources, including education, places of worship, health centers, social networks, identity, and sports activities. We argue that urbanicity in slum contexts should be understood as a multidimensional construct encompassing deprivation, fragmentation, exclusion, and resilience. This reconceptualization advances conceptual clarity, strengthens the validity of mental health research in low-resource settings, and informs interventions that simultaneously address structural risks and promote community assets. The case of Kampala demonstrates how participatory evidence can reshape the understanding of neighborhood effects with implications, for global mental health research and practice.

Background Uganda experiences recurring cholera epidemics. Current interventions prioritize strengthening health systems, neglecting community resilience. This paper explored pathways to enhancing community resilience against cholera. Methods We utilized a realist-informed review approach, employing the conceptual framework of Pawson and Tilley (1997) for data extraction, synthesis, and presentation and Blanchet et al. 2017’s theoretical framework to interpret Mechanisms and Outcome patterns necessary for community resilience. Data sources included peer-reviewed and other literature about Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and government interventions. Findings Current literature on cholera focuses heavily on aspects like community vulnerability, outbreak surveillance, and response strategies and less on broader concepts of community resilience. Kinship resilience literature helped fill the gaps around valuable perspectives on how communities navigate and bounce back from cholera outbreaks. Contextual vulnerability factors include weak detection systems, limited community health worker capacity, and sub-optimal Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene(WASH) practices and inadequate WASH infrastructure within refugee, fishing, and slum communities. Upstream water sources contamination impacts the spread of cholera to downstream areas, while cross-border movement of infected individuals worsens its transmission and spread. Preventive resilience mechanisms involve health system interventions focused on capacity building, WASH programs, community engagement and WASH infrastructures establishment crucially bolster community resilience. Community knowledge acquired through training or experiential learnings in managing cholera, alongside social cohesion reduce vulnerability. While most mechanisms focus on building absorptive resilience capacities, it is not clear how these mechanisms lead to intermediate health outcomes and broader resilience capabilities like adaptation and transformation. Conclusions Realist evaluations provide deeper understanding of how interventions guide effective cholera prevention strategies, leading to resilience. However, further research about community-led actions and external interventions that effectively build resilience is needed. Integrated approaches combining health system strengthening with community-based interventions need to be prioritized, while enhancing social capital, and supporting adaptive and transformative mechanisms for resilience.

Diverse approaches to climate information services are emerging as impacts escalate in an urbanising globe. However, the climate information services involving cities are mainly collaborations with actors from science, multilateral, national and municipal authorities. There are limited efforts to build on knowledge from residents in local communities about risk and response options, to steer collaborations on climate information services. This article examines visual ethnography as an enabler of climate information services that connect societal and scientific objectives at local scales in cities. Based on case study findings from Kampala city in Uganda, local-level framings of climate risks and responses were grouped into exploratory and intersectional framings. The exploratory framings are risks and response options directly linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11 and 13 on cities and climate change respectively, while depicting some degree of contradiction. Intersectional framings are risks and response options demonstrating the interrelatedness of climate issues across different SDGs. Local communities do take on scientific information on impacts and adaptation barriers but also connect risks and responses to experiences of tested options, which sometimes only emerge during the process of visual ethnography and are not initially identified. Visual ethnography can be an important source of information not only on stressors experienced and priority actions by local communities, but can also be a climate solutions imagery, that contains positive adaptation stories with opportunities for enriching and complementing scientific inquiry on responses.

The complex linkage between environment, climate change and migration is increasingly capturing global debate. Uganda faces widespread environmental degradation and high vulnerability to climate change impacts that cause livelihood hardships, inducing human mobility. However, the environment, climate change and migration nexus is not well understood and documented, although advocacy to address the livelihood challenges associated with environmental and climate-induced migrations is on the rise. This paper addresses this knowledge gap and presents findings from a review of literature, complemented by key informant interviews and group discussions conducted in the Karamoja, Mt. Elgon and Teso sub-regions of Uganda. The findings show that some socio-economic hardships that cause migrations like natural resources scarcities (water, pastures and fertile soils), hunger and food insecurity and conflicts are linked to slow-onset processes/events related to environmental degradation, rising temperatures and desertification, compounded by sudden-onset events/disasters including; drought, rainstorms, flooding and landslides, that threaten livelihood security and trigger voluntary and forced migrations. Migration also occurs as a coping strategy to environment and climate shocks and stresses. However, empirical research evidence on the numbers of people who have migrated because of environmental change or climate change is still lacking as more research focus has been on the socio-economic and political drivers of migration. Deeper empirical research that incorporates spatial analyses on how the environmental and climate parameters induce migrations is necessary to provide an evidence base to inform transformative policy processes and actions that address human mobility challenges and build resilient societies in Uganda.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out a normative agenda that offers opportunity for cities to steer profound change globally. But if cities are to play an effective role in localizing the 2030 Agenda, there is a need for systematic engagement with the conundrums presented by the normative dimensions of the SDGs. We argue that African cities offer unique contextual insights into the linkages and overlaps among SDG norms, due to their immensely diverse nature and historically distinct drivers of urbanization. Set against African urban realities, the chapter presents an analytical framework that construes the linkages between global normative statements and local SDG meanings as mainstream and counter-mainstream interpretations. The framework was built by exploring alternative ways of localizing SDGs, through a transdisciplinary waste-to-energy research project in Kampala, Uganda. Based on the locally experienced tensions within the SDGs, we argue for a flexible approach to localization.

With ongoing climate change and rapid urbanization, exposure to severe heat is expected to accelerate in tropical East African cities. Yet not all parts of the city are equally vulnerable. The present-day intra-urban heat stress variation in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, is quantified by deriving the daily mean, minimum and maximum Humidex Index from a network of low-cost temperature and humidity sensors operational in 2018-2019. Heat is shown to be heterogeneously distributed over the city, with a daily maximum intra-urban Humidex Index deviation of 6.4°C averaged over the observational period, but reaching 14.5°C on the most extreme day.Also extreme heat is heterogeneously distributed over the city, putting local populations at risk of great discomfort or health danger. One station in a dense settlement reports a daily maximum Humidex Index above 40°C in 68% of the observation days, a level which was never reached at the nearby campus of the Makerere University, and only a few times at the city outskirts. About 75% of this intra-urban heat stress variability is explained by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), though strong collinearity is found with other variables like impervious surface fraction and population density.Overall, our results highlight the importance of (i) including both temperature and humidity in heat stress studies, (ii) urban greening in city planning, and (iii) large intra-urban heat stress variations in heat action planning in tropical humid cities.