Death of the Nile? (15 min short version) A film by Andy Johnstone Producer: Wild Dog Limted 2009 Script (edited 7/12/09) EXT. NILE RIVER AT JINJA GV's river & communities V/O (00.00.07.00) Flowing north from it's most southerly source in Lake Victoria, the Nile is a great artery, supporting the lives and livelihoods of some 180 million people. Roughly one third of the entire population of the African continent lives in the Nile river basin. Uganda, is just one of ten countries that depend on the river. But climate change means that this environment, which has sustained people for thousands of years, is changing. Fast. EXT. VILLAGE NEAR JINJA Woman washing pots outside a village hut/house. Cut to woman making lunch & then family having lunch. FRANK MURAMUZI (00.00.49.00) The river is where the poor people get water for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for building houses. Secondly it is this river where people get fish and if fish disappears, then the livelihoods of the poor people will be affected. FRANK MURAMUZI (CONT) Some of these people use water for irrigation, like in Egypt, like in Sudan and even in Uganda and if that water is no longer there the people will suffer. ELLIOT (00.01.29.00) Today’s lunch, we have fish, dry fish and 'posho' cassava flour. So sweet. Ejoyaful. Lisa you eat. Why you not eating. ELLIOT (CONT) The extra fish we catch, part of it we sell, part of it we dry and we keep it, because we don't have fridge, that's why we always dry them, we use sunshine and slat in it. This fish they cook like this... this dry fish we just set fire and we put cold water into the pot, pour what we need and after pouring water we just put our dried fish in it, without any cooking oil, onions and the rest. This fish, very early in the morning, I always go to the river, river Nile INTERVIEWER (00.02.36.00) Have you Heard Much about Climate Change? ELLIOT (00.02.40.00) Climate change? I never heard of that... Kids running and playing in the street. GV's Village etc. V/O (00.02.45.00) Elliot lives in a mud hut on the edges of society, so it is not extraordinary that he and his family know nothing about climate change. But elsewhere in Uganda, there are communities that are better informed - because climate change is already affecting their lives. EXT ROAD TO MT ELGON Car sweeps up the road towards Mt Elgon, where Uganda's best coffee is produced. WILLIAM ODINGA (00.03.19.00) I'm on my way up Mt Elgon to interview Wagoire, William director of the Buginyanya Agricultural research Institute. The roads are rough, I've had to stop many tims for the directions but I know we'll get there! Car sweeps up mountain - stunning views etc. V/O (00.03.36.00) Mt Elgon rises to over 2000m and lies to the east of Uganda on the border with Kenya. William has come here to find out more about climate change and how it is affecting Uganda's main cash crop. Coffee. People picking and processing coffee. V/O (00.03.53.00) The Coffee business is crucial to this developing economy, supporting hundreds of people in local communities. But, the Arabica coffee thrives in the cool, highlands of Mt Elgon is under threat from rising global temperatures. This changing climate brings with it an increase in pests and disease. DR CARLO BUONTEMPO (00.04.16.00) The effect of climate change on agriculture is incredibly complex, because on one side, especially in some areas, a beneficial effect of increased temperatures, which means an increase in the length of the growing season. On the other side you have some critical threshold can be exceeded, and depending on plants, different crops have different critical thresholds, but if you exceed that critical threshold the plant just dies. Wagoire and Odinga visit coffee plantation. DR WILLIAM WAGOIRE (00.04.51.00) Here we are in a coffee "shamba" and here you can have a look at how beautiful a well managed coffee field looks like...These are the coffee berries, ready for picking...When all of them are ripe to this extent, this is the farmer's pride! Whne he looks at this he knows is out of the poverty line. Assistant leans across and grabs a leaf. DR WILLIAM WAGOIRE (00.05.04 .00) Actually this is a beautiful example of "leaf rust". You can see it attacks also on the underside of the leaf and you see how... do you call that yellow or what ever it is? Orange? So the whole leaf is going to be covered with that and with that colouration, there is no way the plant can photosynthesize to make food for the plant. EXT. LOWER DOWN THE MOUNTAIN V/O (00.05.35.00) Further down the mountain the next day, William has an appointment with a retired diplomat, Wamimbi Weasa, who now grows trees and farms a small holding. Wamimbi & Odinga shake hands. EXT. WAMIMBI'S PORCH WAMIMBI WEASA Mr Wiliam Odinga, you are very much welcome to my home. (WILLIAM ODINGA (00.05.47.00) Have you noticed any effects of climate change over the past few years? WAMIMBI WEASA (00.06.05.25) Very much so Mr Odinga. In this part where you are, here in Masabaland, there were no mosquitoes during my younger days. Until the 70's or 80's all of the sub-county was mosquito free. But because of the high temperatures the mosquitoes have invaded us. William write notes. WAMIMBI CONT./(00.06.28.04) Of course with the invasion of mosquitoes there is a lot of malaria cases these days. Even more than in those areas where mosquitoes were prevelant in those days. WILLIAM ODINGA This area was also popular for bananas. WAMIMBI Yes so the banana wilt is on with us, but we are trying to eradicate it, or at least reduce it, so we can go back to good production Walk to banana grove. WAMIMBI So William the signs of this banana bacterial wilt, begin like this, with yellow leaves. So the wilt might have been there, but the change, the climate change, might have been a quickening process of increasing this disease. So it has also affected the economy of this area of Uganda. Walks off... WAMIMBI And I am planting new ones and I can see a positive change. EXT. LAKE VICTORIA V/O (00.07.21.29) But while communities in Uganda have already begun to experience climate change, understanding more about the potential long term effects of for the Nile is another issue. CARLO BUONTEMPO (00.07.30.10) I mean, it is always difficult to make a prediction on long term climate change, because the only way we can do it is to prescribe the concentration of greenhouse gases into a global circulation model, so a model describing the global climate and look at how this model describes the average climate in a few years time. And for a certain part of the globe, different models, models developed by different scientific communities agrees on the trend. Like on the Mediterranean we know that especially during the summer it is going to be drier and hotter. And so we are quite confident that on the higher part of the Nile, close to the delta, it is going to be much drier during the summer and much warmer. If you go further south, actually different models predict different situations and you are not that certain about what is going to happen. V/O (00.08.17.21) But new evidence from a research project in Ethiopia, may provide† climate scientists with a better understanding of the Nile's future. EXT. LAKE TANA, ETHIOPIA GV's lake Tana, Ethiopia & Blue Nile falls. INT. HENRY LAMB'S LAB, ABERYSTWYTH HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA)(00.08.26.24) Well we'd been working in Ethiopia† for some years looking at smaller lakes when we realised that noone had done any work on Lake Tana, despite the fact that it is the source of one of the most important rivers in the world, the Blue Nile. HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA CONT.) (00.08.37.20) Initially we got some funding to look at the idea that there had been a drought 4,200 years ago that had caused the collapse of the old kingdom in Egypt. And since the Ethiopian highlands are the source of the water that feeds Egypt, it makes a lot of sense to go to the source of the Blue Nile, to Lake Tana and see if we can find geological evidence for that event. HENRY LAMB (00.09.01.00) When we did our coring, we chose the deepest part of the lake 12m, 14m deep...and almost the last core contained a very dramatic brown peaty sediment, the sort of peat you get out of a bog here. And a bog of course is a terrestrial material, not the sort of material that you find in a lake. So we pulled this core out and thought, "My goodness here we are in business, this must mean a dramatic lowering of lake levels, it must mean the lake dried out in the past." We thought that it was going to be the 4,200 year event, but when we got it back to the lab, its much older, its 16,000 years old. HENRY LAMB (TO CAMERA IN LAB) (00.09.37.00) Here is the clay layer, the stiff clay which represents the dried out lake surface at about 16,000 years ago and from here up is the dark material, very dark peaty material which is deposited in a swamp a papyrus swamp. Lamb takes core sample to testing machine. HENRY LAMB (OFF CAMERA)(00.09.56.22) That peaty sample represents the interval of the lake beginning to fill up after a probably a major drought event about 16,000 years ago, a drought event which affected pretty much all of Africa and is connected to what was going on in the Atlantic. HENRY LAMB (00.10.10.18) We think the ice sheet in the North Atlantic collapsed at that time, sending an armada of ice bergs and melt water across the Atlantic ocean, warming up the oceans and reducing the temperature pressure contrast that drives the monsoon. So the monsoon broke down and the rains failed, probably for a couple of hundred years or more. HENRY LAMB (00.10.33.00) Putting together the geological evidence that we have from Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile and also the earlier evidence from Lake Victoria and Lake Albert the source of the White Nile, the evidence is that all of those lakes dried up some 16,000 years ago, stayed dry or filled up gradually until they overflowed 14,700 years ago. So we can make this dramatic statement that for that period of time, the Nile itself was effectively dry, it had dried to a trickle. HENRY LAMB (00.11.17.00) The concern is that with the climate changing as rapidly as it is now, with global warming, the Greenland ice-sheet may behave in the same way. In fact there is good evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is beginning to move rapidly and perhaps collapse within the next few decades and if that happens it would undoubtedly lead to a flood of fresh water into the North Atlantic and might well affect the current flows through the North Atlantic and eventually the African Monsoon too. EXT. RIVER NILE, JINJA Elliot and friend walk down to the river to fix their boat. V/O (00.11.54.03) Back on the Nile at Jinja in Uganda, Eliot main concern is a hole in his fishing boat. ELLIOT (00.12.00.00) This boat has got some problem when we are trying to fish somewhere that way and we knocked a certain stone inside the water. That's why we got a small accident anyway INTERVIEWER (00.12.20.00) Is it going to take long to fix it? ELLIOT (00.12.22.00) This will not take long. After a short time we shall go in. ELLIOT (00.12.38.00) Yes our boats fantastic, its very strong we can make it. V/O (00.12 .42.00) While Elliot fixes his boat, to prepare him self for another days fishing, the big question is "if the Nile has run dry before for 1300 years, as Henry Lamb's research in Lake Tana suggests, could it run dry again and might this process already begun"? LUCAS NDAWULA (00.13.00.00) In 2006 and part of 2007, we had low water levels here and all this vast area that you are seeing here was laid bare. LUCAS NDAWULA (00.13.15.00) At the bottom here you find nest s of Talapia. These nests are the ones hat are built by the male Talapia and they are used by females to deposit their eggs and for the eggs to get fertilised and if this is laid bare then this means that this activity, this very very important breeding activity cannot take place. And definitely that one will affect the stocks of that fish species and all the communities who depend upon it. V/O (00.13.46.00) According recent reports from Sudan, the Nile has been at one of its lowest levels for over a century. DECLAN CONWAY (00.13.53.00) What we are concerned about is potentially rapid and extreme changes occurring in the future because of global climate change. There is scientific evidence from lake cores and environmental reconstructions that these part of the world have seen humid periods, so it has been much wetter than it is now, but they have also seen much much drier periods and during those times what we see is rivers drying up, lakes drying out and massive environmental changes, over quite vast periods of time. DECLAN CONWAY (00.14.30.00) We now have very different circumstance, we now have millions more people living in the region and their livelihoods and the national economies are very dependent on the availability of water and the ability to be able to grow crops. So if changes occur over the next 10, 20, 30 years in the future, then they will have absolutely dramatic consequences. ELLIOT (00.14.52.00) Tomorrow morning I will going for fishing. I have already completed repairing my boat and the boats now very strong. Now we shall be able to at least to catch something from the river Nile, where we always survive from. And then maybe int he evening, I will be going for some leisure time, maybe take a bit of booze somewher over "Mabo". Yeah...this is what i will do. Hmmmm. - ENDS - © Andy Johnstone, Wild Dog Limited 2009 www.wilddogworld.com +44 207 193 4277