Uganda community collaboration targets climate hazards with reforestation

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Plants dead and alive tell stories at the core of Sarah Ivory’s research. Drawing on fossils, modern observations and models, the associate professor of geosciences at Penn State pulls from Earth’s past — and knowledge of how ecosystems shift — to strategize responses to climate change.

In a mountainous part of western Uganda, Ivory hopes the work will help prevent worsening threats. She and collaborators are forging a reforestation plan to counter climate-related disasters: deadly rainstorms, landslides and mudslides that have ravaged infrastructure, homes, farmland and livestock in recent years.

Their project centers in Kilembe, a village adjacent to the Rwenzori Mountains where tourism fuels the economy. Ivory first set out there to assess how warming since the last ice age affected ecosystems. Glaciers at the UNESCO World Heritage site have dwindled to one today from 43 in 1906 — a sign of accelerating shifts in the climate, she said.

“I realized there was this really important connection between what was happening in the natural system upstream and then the downstream impacts to the village itself,” said Ivory, a faculty associate of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) who first visited Kilembe in 2024. “It’s all part of the climate change story in this region.”

She is partnering with Penn State Assistant Professor of Geography Ida Djenontin, local community members and the Ski Club Uganda nonprofit to develop tree-based adaptation strategies for the area. Their goal isn’t only to ease devastating impacts of torrential precipitation, but also to engage residents and students — including Ugandan and Penn State students — in studying the approaches collectively.

Those participants in a pilot endeavor planted and began mapping about 1,500 trees over several days in June, Ivory said. The trees include indigenous varieties that may mitigate damage from floods and landslides — thanks to dense root networks or rapid growth, for instance — and could produce timber or food, among other benefits.

Over time, researchers will document which trees survive and which resist droughts, floods and other challenges. Most importantly, Ivory said, they will monitor for strategies that best reduce ecosystem destruction and support local needs. Their observations will inform reforestation concepts as a stabilizing bulwark against extreme conditions, she explained.

The group’s findings and approach could encourage similar work by other communities contending with high water and related hazards, said Caleb Norville, a Penn State doctoral student in geosciences. As climate-related flooding in Africa worsens, the project prioritizes community leadership, biodiversity and ecosystem characteristics in adaptation actions.

“If successful, I think our model could be applied pretty much anywhere with similar issues like flooding,” said Norville, a collaborator with Ivory on reforestation-based strategies and on a separate U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research project in the Rwenzoris. The NSF work, titled “Fire, ecosystem, and landscape dynamics in Afroalpine environments in a warmer world,” explores changes in fire, vegetation and flooding in tropical mountains.

Norville witnessed high water first-hand on a June 2025 trip to the Rwenzoris area, where a rising river in the dry season blocked the only road in and out of Kilembe. That was tame compared with even higher water levels that materialize in the earlier wet season. But it underscored just how quickly conditions change and upend daily life – and why it’s crucial to mitigate the danger, Norville said. The Rwenzoris are known for their rainforest and rare species.

“People who remember a 2013 flood say the Earth shook from boulders moving down the river,” Norville said. “Growing trees as green infrastructure might help prevent slope destabilization and erosion.”

Another colleague, senior environmental and mountain geographer Bob Nakileza, said flooding-related infrastructure damage affected two local hydroelectricity plants in 2021 and 2023, respectively, highlighting knock-on effects of increasingly extreme and frequent weather. Nakileza is a faculty member at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, a partner for Ivory and Djenontin’s work.

“People have been affected enormously by heavy rains,” he said. “We hope that more robust reforestation efforts can improve the stability of the soils, the stability of the riverbanks — hence the socioecological resilience.”

Nakileza doubles as executive director of the Mountain Innovation and Research Institute in Uganda, which also backs the work.

“We hope residents can also engage in farm-level, tree-based restoration strategies with adequate support,” Nakileza said of the efforts among researchers and community stakeholders.

Djenontin, an affiliate of EESI whose own research addresses forest landscape restoration in Africa, underscored social benefits of community-based reforestation. The process can draw from communities’ perceptions, cultural values and knowledge systems while integrating local needs and aspirations, she said.

“The work will allow us to adopt a socioecological systems perspective in examining what can effectively support restoration of unique ecosystems for multiple ecosystem services and key socio-institutional challenges,” said Djenontin, co-director of the University’s Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design with Africa (AESEDA). Ivory is affiliated with AESEDA as well.

Students across cultures are learning from one another as they collect and analyze data and hone statistics skills, Djenontin said. Around 40 students — including about 30 from Uganda, with many hailing from the capital city, Kampala, and five from Penn State — participated in initial field operations this year, working together and alongside the community.

Other collaborators include a local tour operator, Rwenzori Trekking Services, and a community-led reforestation initiative.

“It’s very much a reciprocal relationship with the community,” said Karen Van-Thu Pham, a Penn State doctoral candidate in geosciences who interviewed Ugandan farmers about their past experiences. “It’s going to be important to work on climate change mitigation but also adaptation. That can’t happen without the voices of people who live and work, day to day, in that area.”

Subsistence farming, or growing crops mainly to feed one’s own family, claimed much of the rainforest that had been just outside Rwenzori Mountains National Park, said Florian Knollmann, research collaborator and founder of Ski Club Uganda. With fewer indigenous trees, the area is more prone to landslides and easier to dry under the baking sun.

“We’re relying on our local partners — they have been trying to make change happen in their community for a while,” Knollmann said. His nonprofit helps communities adapt to climate change, in part by leveraging tourism, and takes its name from skiing adventures that date back decades. The original “club,” in the 1950s, was less an organization than an informal designation for skiers who attempted Rwenzori glaciers.

This year, Ski Club Uganda members, in collaboration with Penn State students, appeared at several grade schools in Uganda to support forest-restoration efforts and talk with youngsters.

“We see the children as environmental stewards of the future,” Knollmann said. “If they learn how to take care of these trees, and they build the habit of planting these trees, they can take those ideas home.”

Together with Nakileza and Djenontin, Ivory and Knollmann are investigating how to structure future reforestation work that maximizes student and community involvement, environmental resilience and research outputs over a decade or longer.

“This research needs to be community-led to be sustainable and effective to benefit the community and the environment for years to come,” Ivory said, adding that actions now can have significant impacts for many generations.

“We want to reach a point where communities, building on their local knowledge, understand what works well to reduce flooding and prevent catastrophes,” she said. “We want to make ourselves obsolete.”