ATC Uganda plants 1,000 trees in Nakaseke to mitigate climate change

Wireless and broadcast towers provider, American Tower Corporation (ATC) and partners on Friday planted 1,000 trees in Kiteredde village, Nakaseke District.

The activity was a collaborative effort with the private sector under the Running Out of Trees (ROOTS) campaign spearheaded by the Ministry of Water and Environment in partnership with Tree Adoption Uganda (TAU).

According to ATC, the tree planting activity is part of its campaign to plant 30,000 trees countrywide by 2023, a move aimed at helping to mitigate diverse effects of climate change in the country.

Amidst the intesified deforestation in the country, the company says the campaign aims at engaging local stakeholders in attaining national restoration goals of restoring over 2.5 million hectares of degraded forest landscape by 2030.

Speaking to the media, the Chief Executive Officer of ATC Uganda, Dorothy Ssemanda said the activity was part of their environmental strategy aimed at significantly reducing carbon emissions by some of their assets.

She highlighted that ATC has significantly invested in green energy, evidenced by the fact that that they have so far planted about 7,000 trees and plan to plant 30,000 trees across Uganda by 2023.

“That journey for us is a continuous one where quarterly, we come with all our staff and put these trees on the ground. We are mapping them to ensure that they are growing and we feel very very strongly that this is a good way for every corporate citizen to contribute to sustaining or to restoring the environment,” Ssemanda noted.

She further noted that for them, tree planting is very important and that for the many towers they put around the country, they target to have triple or more trees everywhere.

Speaking at the event, Angella Kansemeire, the projects officer at Tree Adoption Uganda said their effort in partnership with ATC is geared towards improving forest cover in the different parts of the country identifying those that have been greatly affected by deforestation to facilitate other economic activities.

"The trees that have been planted here will be monitored by our mapping technology that allows us to track all the trees we have planted in the country to ensure their that they have been able to survive for at least 10 years, while they reduce the CO2 composition in the environment, fostering him a survival,” Kansemeire said.

To asses these and other climate-related risks, the diesel-reduction goal that was set by ATC in 2017, has led to the adoption of ambitious Green House Gases (GHG) emissions reduction targets and efforts to help limit future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, address climate change and help citizens meet their own GHG emissions reduction commitments.